COVID-19: Democracies have proven they have the edge in coping with this crisis

Throughout the centuries, competitors of the prevailing system have known that disaster presents them with an opportunity. Writing about the Black Death, which culled more than 40 per cent of Europe’s population, the historian David Herlihy notes that the plague, “discredited the leaders of society, its governors, priests, and intellectuals, and the laws and theories supported by them”.

The current pandemic is not just challenging individual leaders, but democracy itself — or so the story goes. What is certainly true is that democracy is already in decline: more countries have lost than gained civil and political rights each year for over a decade. On the surface it might look as if Covid-19 has already turned a democratic recession into a depression.

In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte has seized even greater powers, while the Hungarian parliament has granted Viktor Orban’s government indefinite emergency powers. Perhaps more worrying still, China and some of its allies are pointing to Beijing’s success in clamping down on the pandemic as a strong case for authoritarianism.

Even the World Health Organization has called China’s forceful lockdown “perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment in history”. Meanwhile America, the leader of the free world, is struggling to come to grips with the pandemic, after years of polarisation and gridlock. However, if political regimes are judged by how they have responded to the pandemic, a democratic depression seems unlikely: Covid-19 has exposed the flaws of authoritarianism while showing the strengths of democracy. First, the lack of transparency in authoritarian regimes is undisputable and its consequences for fighting the pandemic catastrophic.

In Turkmenistan, doctors are banned from diagnosing Covid-19 and people are not allowed to discuss the outbreak in public. And while China mobilised a strong national response when President Xi Jinping finally took action, in Wuhan local officials first tried to hush it up. This delayed decisive measures to curb the virus before its global spread. Second, democracies have responded more effectively to contain the contagion. My own research, with Chinchih Chen and Giorgio Presidente, shows that authoritarian regimes introduced more stringent lockdowns and rely more on intrusive contact tracing.

But across 111 countries, we found that democracies’ lockdown measures were more effective in reducing movement and travel, which risks spreading the virus. Citizens in democracies, it seems, are more likely to abide by the rules set by their governments. This is in line with studies showing that political repression reduces co-operation. While autocrats often seek to capitalise on perceived threats, their handling of the pandemic will not look appealing to the outside world.

China’s strict lockdown has received the most attention, but flourishing democracies such as South Korea and Taiwan handled Covid-19 better by just about any measure. As our research shows, the countries that have responded most effectively are democracies that also have collectivist cultural traits. It is evident from the World Value Survey that South Korea, Taiwan, and China are all highly collectivistic — as is reflected in their longstanding habit of wearing masks to protect fellow citizens. Collectivism, which emphasises group loyalty, conformity and obedience towards superiors, also makes collective action easier, such as mounting a co-ordinated response to a pandemic.

Individualism, on the other hand, is associated with greater suspicion of government interventions. Harvard’s Joseph Henrich and collaborators have found that western Europeans — and their cultural descendants in North America and Australia — stand out as particularly individualistic. This has given them an advantage as they tend to reward nonconformism, which is essential for innovation. Studies show that individualistic cultures, like those of the US, Sweden and the UK, produce more radical innovations. But they have all fared badly during Covid-19, with among the highest death rates per head. When disasters take on catastrophic dimensions, people feel that governments have failed their main social function: defence of the common welfare. So far, democracies with more collectivist cultural traits have responded better to the pandemic.

There is reason to believe that collectivist values will spread after coronavirus: a recent study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society found that collectivist versus individualistic attitudes vary with pathogen risk, suggesting that increases in disease exposure might make countries more collectivist. But winning against Covid-19 will require more people to abide by government rules. It will also require innovation to find treatments and vaccines. Dynamism flourishes in free and open societies. Recognising that democracies have managed the pandemic better is a first essential step towards the preservation of democratic government.

-Financial Times