The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the forefront the question of whether democracies are more or less effective than autocracies in responding to epidemics.
Kelly McMann, professor of political science, and Daniel Tisch, associate professor of population and quantitative health sciences, presented research they conducted into the question at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.
Their preliminary results show that democracy has neither advantaged nor disadvantaged countries in their fight against epidemics generally or against cholera epidemics specifically. And, they found that it is too early to judge democracy’s impact on COVID-19 because COVID-19 death data have not been confirmed and standardized.