Populism and COVID-19: How Populist Governments (Mis)Handle the Pandemic

M. Bayerlein, V. Boese, S. Gates, Katrin Kamin, S. Murshed
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引用次数: 27

Abstract

Populist parties and actors now govern various countries around the world. Often elected by the public in times of economic crises and over the perceived failure of the elites, the question stands as to how populist governments actually perform once elected. Using the pandemic shock in the form of the COVID-19 crises, our paper answers the question of how populist governments handle the pandemic. We answer this question by introducing a theoretical framework according to which (1) populist governments enact less far-reaching policy measures to counter the pandemic,(2) lower the effort of citizens to counter the pandemic, and are ultimately (3) hit worse by the pandemic. We test the propositions in a sample of 42 countries with weekly data from 2020. Employing econometric models, we find empirical support for our propositions and ultimately conclude that excess mortality exceeds the excess mortality of conventional countries by 10 percentage points (i.e., 100%). Our findings have important implications for the assessment of populist government performance in general as well as counter-pandemic measures in particular by providing evidence that opportunistic and inadequate policy responses as well as spreading misinformation and downplaying the pandemic are strongly related to increases in COVID-19 mortality.
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民粹主义与COVID-19:民粹主义政府如何(错误地)应对大流行
民粹主义政党和行动者现在统治着世界上许多国家。民粹主义政府通常是在经济危机时期、在精英们明显失败的情况下由公众选出的,问题在于民粹主义政府一旦当选,实际表现如何。我们的论文以COVID-19危机的形式利用大流行的冲击,回答了民粹主义政府如何应对大流行的问题。我们通过引入一个理论框架来回答这个问题,根据这个理论框架,(1)民粹主义政府制定的对抗大流行的政策措施影响较小,(2)降低公民对抗大流行的努力,并最终(3)受大流行的打击更严重。我们在42个国家的样本中测试了这些命题,这些国家从2020年开始每周都有数据。采用计量经济模型,我们发现实证支持我们的主张,并最终得出结论,超额死亡率超过传统国家的超额死亡率10个百分点(即100%)。我们的研究结果对评估民粹主义政府的总体表现,特别是应对大流行的措施具有重要意义,因为它提供了证据,证明机会主义和不充分的政策反应,以及传播错误信息和淡化大流行与COVID-19死亡率的增加密切相关。
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