Government capacity, societal trust or party preferences: what accounts for the variety of national policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe?

European states responded to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 with a variety of public policy measures. In this article we ask what can account for this variation in policy responses, and we identify a number of factors related to institutions, general governance and specific health-sector related capacities, societal trust, government type, and party preferences as possible determinants. Using multivariate regression and survival analysis, we model the speed with which school closures and national lockdowns were imposed. The models suggest a number of significant and often counterintuitive relationships: more centralized countries with lower government effectiveness, freedom and societal trust, but with separate ministries of health and health ministers with medical background acted faster and more decisively. High perceived capacity might have provided false confidence to the governments, resulting in a delayed response to the early stages of the pandemic. Furthermore, more right-wing and authoritarian governments responded faster.

2020年，面对新型冠状病毒肺炎（COVID-19）疫情在欧洲的快速扩散，欧洲各国推出了一系列差异化的公共政策防控举措。本文旨在探究此类政策应对举措存在差异的成因，并遴选出与制度架构、整体治理水平、特定卫生系统能力、社会信任度、政府类型以及政党倾向相关的若干潜在影响因素。本研究采用多元回归与生存分析方法，对学校停课与全国性封锁措施的实施速度展开建模分析。模型结果揭示了多组具有统计显著性且往往违背直觉的关联：集权程度更高的国家，即便行政效能、言论自由度与社会信任度更低，但只要设有独立卫生部且卫生部长具备医学背景，其防疫响应速度更快、决策更果决。过高的感知系统能力，反而可能令政府产生虚假的安全感，进而导致疫情早期阶段的防控响应出现延误。此外，右翼倾向与威权主义色彩更强的政府，其防疫响应速度反而更快。