Institutions, Trust and Responsiveness: Patterns of Government and Private Action During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Why have countries responded differently to the COVID-19 pandemic? We explore the role of institutions in shaping the response of governments and citizens to the progression of the disease, both conceptually and empirically. We document a puzzling fact: countries with "good institutions"-strong executive constraints, the holding of free and fair elections and more freedom-tend to have performed worse during the initial phase of the pandemic. They have been slower to implement a lockdown and experienced a larger death toll. On the other hand, countries with higher interpersonal trust and higher confidence in government appear to have fared better. We find limited evidence of differences in mobility reduction by citizens based on institutions in their country. Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown into sharp relief questions about government and citizen responsiveness to the greatest global health crisis in more than 100 years. The pandemic has led to a series of unprecedented policy measures ranging from lockdowns to government-funded furlough-and requests for citizens to suspend their normal economic and social interactions to limit the spread of the disease. In this article, we examine how different governments and societies have responded to this challenge, and what factors determined effective governance during the pandemic. There is powerful received wisdom that effective governments, at least in terms of economic success, are those that are constrained by institutional arrangements and that promote people's basic liberties. 1 Thus we would have expected that high-income countries in the Western world, with their open societies and democratic institutions, to be well-placed to fight the pandemic, and that effective public action would flourish where there is accountability and open debate. This expectation is rooted in the fact that such governments have better incentives to assess health risks and the capacity to undertake policy initiatives needed to halt the spread of the disease. This view was confirmed by a global assessment of health capabilities in 2019, which placed the United States and the United Kingdom among the countries best prepared to address pandemic diseases. 2 There is a compelling logic linking a government's preparedness and responsiveness to health crises with their pre-existing institutions and state capacity. State capacity, which we use to refer to a state's ability to implement a range of policies, tends to be more developed in countries with more cohesive institutions, i.e. those which facilitate reaching a policy consensus across a range of issues. 3 When it comes to deploying those capacities, we expect effective public action to flourish where there is accountability and open debate. Greater capacity should also build public trust which further facilitates compliance with public health measures. But for believers in this conventional wisdom, some features of the pandemic are puzzling. As Figure 1 shows, high-income countries and those with more individual freedoms have generally fared worse, not better, than countries without civil liberties and/or with lower incomes. This seeming incongruity warrants debate and discussion. 4