The United States’ initial response to COVID-19 was lackluster. President Trump’s strategy was mostly one of dismissing the virus. The federal government failed to create enough testing kits, did not distribute enough personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators to hospitals, initially delayed distributing medical supplies to the states, and routinely spread misinformation about the virus. However, the extent to which this terrible federal response is the fault of American democracy and not merely the fault of the Trump administration is debatable. 

Wesleyan University

The typical case studies used to compare democracies and autocracies on COVID-19 response are two of the largest countries in the world: China and the United States.

Typical Case Studies of COVID-19 Response

Stasavage, D. (2020). Democracy, Autocracy, and Emergency Threats: Lessons for Covid-19 From the Last Thousand Years. International Organization 74, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818320000338

Stasavage (2020)

Scheppele, K. L. & Pozen, D. (2020). Executive Overreach and Underreach in the Pandemic. In M. P. Maduro & P. W. Kahn (Eds.), Democracy in Times of Pandemic: Different Futures Imagined. (pp. 38-53). New York: Cambridge University Press. 

Scheppele and Pozen (2020)

China is often cited as having a successful response to the pandemic. For instance, the World Health Organization (WHO) lauded its city-wide lockdowns and monitoring of its citizens as “perhaps the most ambitious … disease containment effort in history.” As an autocracy, China was able to pursue an aggressive quarantine without human rights considerations. However, its autocratic nature might be to blame for the pandemic in the first place, as the government suppressed information about COVID-19 early on. The disease was then able to spread freely among an oblivious population before the government decided to contain it.

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