Replication Data for “Regimes, Leaders, and Lockdowns: Who Responded More Quickly to the COVID-19 Pandemic?”

Explanations of the speed of policy responses to COVID-19 highlight two sets of arguments. One focuses on regime type. Did autocracies, with fewer institutional constraints and high coercive power, lock down more quickly than democracies? The second concerns the “type” of health policymaker. Did governments led by doctors or natural scientists respond more quickly, and did men and populists delay lockdown? We examine these relationships with a global dataset of political regimes and relevant traits of 188 political leaders and health ministers in office at the start of the pandemic. Our setup addresses concerns about reciprocal causation and sample selection bias and proves robust to potential confounders. We find autocracies locked down more slowly than democracies, while leader traits appear not to matter. However, medical doctors in the health portfolio are associated with lower likelihood of lockdown, suggesting they may have provided cover for leaders hesitant to do so.

关于新冠疫情政策响应速度的相关研究，主要提出两类核心论点。其一聚焦于政体类型：制度约束较少且强制权力较强的威权政体，是否比民主政体更快实施封控举措？其二则围绕卫生政策制定者的“类型”展开：由医生或自然科学家领衔的政府，是否能更快做出疫情响应？而男性领导者与民粹主义领导者是否会推迟封控举措？本研究依托覆盖全球政治政体的数据集，以及新冠大流行初期在职的188位政治领导人与卫生部长的相关特征数据，对上述两类关联展开实证检验。本研究的研究设计有效规避了反向因果与样本选择偏误的内生性问题，且经检验对各类潜在混淆变量均保持稳健性。研究结果显示，威权政体的封控速度显著慢于民主政体，而领导人的个人特征似乎并未对封控速度产生显著影响。不过，担任卫生部门负责人的医师，与封控实施的较低概率存在显著关联，这或意味着他们为犹豫推行封控举措的领导者提供了政治掩护。