Devastation Caused by COVID-19: Is Democracy to Blame?

Several democracies, such as Italy, Spain, France, the United Kingdom and the United States, have observed relatively higher number of deaths from COVID-19, raising the concern about the effectiveness of democratic political institutions in dealing with the public health crisis the scale of COVID-19. In this paper, we use available cross-sectional dataset of deaths by COVID-19 from 120 countries to empirically examine this concern. We find very weak, albeit some, evidence that democratic political institutions is one potential cause behind the higher number of deaths in certain countries. While we cannot completely rule out the role of democratic political institutions however it is too early to blame democracy for the havoc caused by COVID-19. Nevertheless, we find robust evidence that countries with higher share of young population aged between 14 to 64 years experienced significantly lower deaths, while the countries with higher tourist arrivals experienced relatively higher deaths.