State, Regime, Government, and Society in COVID-19 Response: Establishing Baseline Expectations – Duck of Minerva

State, Regime, Government, and

Society in COVID-19 Response:
Establishing Baseline Expectations
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State, Regime, Government, and Society in COVID-19 Response: Establishing Baseline Expectations – Duck of Minerva

2020-03-17

This is a guest post from Sofia Fenner, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bryn
Mawr College. Her research explores co-optation under authoritarianism, with a regional
focus on the Middle East and North Africa.

Much like the fall of the Soviet Union or the onset of the Arab Spring, the global
coronavirus pandemic offers us intriguing variation: as diverse polities confront similar
shocks, we see striking differences in how (and how well) different countries respond.

Though we are only a few months into the outbreak, we have already seen success
stories in some countries—mitigated or even contained outbreaks—and horrifying failures
in others: health systems overwhelmed, death tolls spiking, drastic measures seeming to
fall short.

What explains this variation? Initial accounts have focused overwhelmingly on regime
type, asking how democratic and authoritarian systems differ in their responses to a novel
disease outbreak. But regime type is just one of several fundamental comparative politics
variables that might determine the success of a pandemic response. I offer a preliminary
exploration of how several key variables—regime type, yes, but also state capacity,
leadership response, and societal buy-in—map onto the responses we have seen to
date.

By establishing baseline expectations using the cases we have already observed, we will
be better prepared to assess how well other countries—especially those that currently
have few or no cases—will respond to full-blown outbreaks. We may also be able to
identify outliers: countries that over- or under-perform their fundamentals, so to speak.
Identifying over-performing cases may point us to practices, choices, or interventions that
could be applied in other contexts. If journalism is the first draft of history, analyses like
this are only barely second drafts: big, broad, necessarily impressionistic. My goal here is

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State, Regime, Government, and Society in COVID-19 Response: Establishing Baseline Expectations – Duck of Minerva

to sketch out potential interventions among major variables as a way of opening up a

broader conversation.

For the purposes of this exercise, I identified four key variables:

Regime type refers to the rules regulating access to political power. I work here with a
binary authoritarian/democratic distinction, assuming authoritarian regimes to have fewer
veto points (Iran may be an exception), greater pre-existing authority to regulate social
life, greater control over media, and less transparency.

State capacity is the infrastructural apparatus available to rulers to implement their

policies, including both the physical infrastructure of the state and the quality,
professionalism, and experience of state employees. Nationalized schools and
nationalized health care systems contribute to higher state capacity, along with better
roads, better-resourced public health authorities, a more effective postal service, etc. The
size and capacity of military forces also counts toward state capacity, and we have seen
military forces mobilized in several countries to respond to the pandemic.

Meaningful federalism and decentralization decrease central state capacity, which is one
reason why the United States ranks relatively low on this metric. While certain sub-state
units could have higher or lower capacity, we are concerned here with the national-level
response. I use a binary high/low measure for state capacity, although—as with regime
type—a continuous measure would be preferable.

Leadership response measures the extent to which political leaders took the outbreak
seriously from its early emergence and directed the state apparatus to address it. This
variable specifically concerns the government—the individuals or parties in positions of
power—as distinct from regime type.

Societal buy-in acknowledges the role that societies play in disease spread (and, more
broadly, in determining the ultimate effectiveness of any state intervention). For the
moment, it is a measure of the extent to which people seem to be complying with

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State, Regime, Government, and Society in COVID-19 Response: Establishing Baseline Expectations – Duck of Minerva

government-ordered social
distancing recommendations (and, in the absence of such
recommendations,
whether people implement social distancing on their own).

Putting
these variables together produces the following chart of varying response
outcomes:

This
chart inspires several observations:

1. The best outcomes so far come from higher-capacity states, regardless of regime
type.

This is not surprising: high state capacity gives rulers more tools to confront all crises,
including epidemiological ones. Robust infrastructure facilitates rapid response and gives
leaders tools they can repurpose for public health purposes (to take a somewhat

concerning example, consider Israel’s repurposing of surveillance tools for

epidemiological contact tracing).

Many of the high-capacity East Asian cases also benefitted from recent experience

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State, Regime, Government, and Society in COVID-19 Response: Establishing Baseline Expectations – Duck of Minerva

dealing with SARS and H1N1; they have had opportunities to develop state capacities
specifically suited to this kind of crisis. That bodes well for some otherwise low-capacity

African states that have developed procedures to combat HIV, Ebola, and other infectious
diseases.

2. The best outcomes are also found in cases with timely and proactive leadership
responses.

We do not yet know how much proactive leadership can do with a weak state, but the
Italian example shows that a delayed response can put even a decently capable state in

serious trouble. Italy’s system of universal health coverage and low-cost access may have
helped, but it did not save the country from becoming the disease’s second epicenter. It
seems to be the case that, at least for pandemics, the machinery of state must be put into
action; it cannot be relied upon to simply act on its own (as Foucauldian scholars show us
it does in many other situations).

This poses a problem for comparativists, who generally prefer to theorize the structural
features of societies, states, and economies rather than the choices of individual leaders.
Of course, it may well turn out that deeper forces are at work in driving leadership
responses. When we look more closely at the actions of leaders who downplayed the
risks of COVID-19, we may find that they were in close re-election battles, suffered from
comprehensive information problems that made judging the situation difficult, or had prior
antagonistic relationships with their own state apparatuses.

3. Does regime type matter?

When I shared a version of this chart with Dan Slater at the University of Michigan, his
first response was, “so does regime type matter at all?” As a scholar of regimes, I am
predisposed to think that it does, but he has a point. Both authoritarian and democratic
regimes can fail or succeed at pandemic response (the same is true of most major socio-
political projects, from dam-building to literacy promotion).

The

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State, Regime, Government, and Society in COVID-19 Response: Establishing Baseline Expectations – Duck of Minerva

Authoritarian information problems (first diagnosed in Ronald Wintrobe’s 1998

Political Economy of Dictatorship) are the key concern here. In authoritarian regimes, both
rulers and citizens systematically lack reliable information, hampering their ability to make
the correct decisions. Such information problems clearly played a role in the initial genesis

of a major outbreak in China. The state’s initial response, to silence Dr. Li Wenliang and
other medical professionals who reported the novel virus, squandered valuable time and
deprived citizens of opportunities to protect themselves. Dr. Li died a hero several weeks
later, but by then the outbreak had reached truly massive proportions.

China,
however, is an exceptional case: surely governments will be better at taking an
outbreak seriously when it has already proved devastating elsewhere. China,
Iran, and
Italy had the bad luck to be hit first, and democratic Italy has
proved little better at tackling
the problem than authoritarian Iran—although,
again, we may not know the full extent of
the Iranian outbreak.

Authoritarianism may also matter when it comes to social buy-in: if a regime has already
established pathways for forcing or otherwise inducing people to do what it wants, getting
citizens to comply with social distancing protocols will be easier. But—as the everyday
heroism of healthcare workers in China and elsewhere shows—proactive societies may
well be able to fill some part of the gap left by an inattentive government or a rickety state.

Caveats: Equity and Uncertainty

The above chart also comes with two important caveats.

First, I have sorted responses based on their effectiveness at either containing or

mitigating an outbreak. Most of us, however, would agree that more goes into a “good”
response than just efficacy; respect for human rights, equity, and the environment surely
matter too. Right now, it seems difficult to focus on anything other than death tolls and
case counts, but there is variation on these other fronts as well. In the coming months,
brave people will document violations and inequities perpetrated in the name of saving
lives; if for no other reason than data availability, social scientists should be among the

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State, Regime, Government, and Society in COVID-19 Response: Establishing Baseline Expectations – Duck of Minerva

first to defend them.

The second caveat is that there is much we still do not know. Many of the possible
pathways on this chart have not yet been filled. We don’t know much about what happens
in low-capacity democracies with rapid leadership responses, nor about what happens in
low-capacity authoritarian regimes, regardless of leadership quality. We lack comparative
leverage on the exact role social buy-in can play, or the extent to which it varies
independently of government response (if leadership clearly and strongly encourages
social distancing, are people more likely to adopt it?).

This
is only a preliminary foray, an attempt to spark conversation rather than
provide
definitive answers. The variables considered here may turn out to
matter differently at
different points in time; they may be proxies for other,
deeper causal forces; they may co-
vary (indeed, some of them almost certainly
do); they may be irrelevant. Experts on
individual countries and on the
specific infrastructure and political actors involved will have
much more to
say, and we should listen closely. Epidemiologists and public health
specialists can help us reckon with the clear but tricky role of time in all of
this. Impressive
interdisciplinary work already exists on disaster response and
we should consult and build
upon it.

Variation intrigues everyone, not just scholars

of comparative politics. As people around
the world start to develop their own
accounts of why different countries have responded
differently, we should be
active participants in the conversation, offering concepts and
prior
experience, listening carefully, and working with interlocutors to develop
better
questions and sharper critiques.

Health

COVID19

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