Populism and COVID-19: How Populist Governments (Mis)Handle the Pandemic

Abstract

Populist parties and actors now govern various countries around the world. Often elected by the public in times of economic crises and over the perceived failure of the elites, the question stands as to how populist governments actually perform once elected. Using the pandemic shock in the form of the COVID-19 crises, our paper answers the question of how populist governments handle the pandemic. We answer this question by introducing a theoretical framework according to which (1) populist governments enact less far-reaching policy measures to counter the pandemic, (2) lower the effort of citizens to counter the pandemic, and are ultimately (3) hit worse by the pandemic. We test the propositions in a sample of 42 countries with weekly data from 2020. Employing econometric models, we find empirical support for our propositions and ultimately conclude that excess mortality exceeds the excess mortality of conventional countries by 10 percentage points (i.e., 100%). Our findings have important implications for the assessment of populist government performance in general as well as counter-pandemic measures in particular by providing evidence that opportunistic and inadequate policy responses as well as spreading misinformation and downplaying the pandemic are strongly related to increases in COVID-19 mortality.