Who has done a better job in fighting the COVID-19 epidemic? Left or Right?

ABSTRACT

This research examines the impact of government ideology on fighting the COVID-19 pandemic based on the daily data of 143 countries from January 1, 2020 to January 31, 2021. By using the panel corrected standard errors model, the results show that a right-wing ruling party is linked with a greater number of new daily confirmed cases and deaths of COVID-19. This impact also appears in the samples of non-OECD countries and Asian countries, and the impact of government ideology on the COVID-19 epidemic is more pronounced in Asian countries. Moreover, we find that government ideology had no effect on COVID-19 before March 11, 2020, while after that time it played a significant role in controlling the epidemic, because of the announcement of a “global pandemic” from the World Health Organization on March 11. In sum, our findings deepen the understanding of the relationship between government ideology and COVID-19 epidemic.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• government ideology
• government response

JEL codes:

• I10
• I18
• H51

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Chun-Ping Chang for excellent research assistance and to the anonymous referees for helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this article. Hai-Jie Wang is grateful to the National Social Science Foundation of China for financial support through grant, 20BJY094.

Notes

1. We can take Australia and Argentina as an example since the two are ruled by right-wing and left-wing governments, respectively. When COVID-19 confirmed cases exceeded 1000, they had totally different response. Argentina imposed full containment measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19, while Australia did not implement restrictions on schools, workplaces, public transport, and a stay-at-home requirement.

2. The source of information comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia.

3. Since the announcement of the global pandemic by WHO on March 11, 2020, a large variety of measures was imposed by governments in the world to control the spread of COVID-19, including cross-border travel bans, movement restrictions, and the closure of schools. For example, the Norway government announced school closing and public transport closing on March 12 and enacted international travel restrictions on March 14.

4. The results of robustness tests are provided in Online Appendix Table 3 and Table 4.