Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Social Democracy and COVID-19 Containment

    If you had to predict what kinds of advanced industrial economies would be most likely to contain the spread of COVID-19, would your answer be? For me, the key factors would be a strong state with an effective bureaucracy and the ability to compel citizens to comply with public health directives. Such states tend to favor social stability and cohesion over individual rights and liberties.

    There are two ways that you might end up with such a strong state that favors stability over individual liberty. One is the “social democratic” model. The other is the “developmental state” model, pioneered by Japan and followed by Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan.

    As it turns out, you can see this in the data. I grabbed from the JHU github page the most recent data (as of this morning) on COVID-19 cases by country, and matched it with the data from Lane Kenworthy‘s new book Social Democratic Capitalism. If you simply correlate Kenworthy’s measure of social democracy (1980-2015) with the current case count as a fraction of population, you don’t find much. But if you take out South Korea and Japan (historically the developmental states) and Australia and New Zealand (islands), you get a very nice negative correlation between social democracy and confirmed COVID-19 cases.


    These results hold up (p < .05, N = 21, adjusted R2 = .48) in a regression that also controls for health spending, GDP per capita, and log of population. It helps to be a social democracy, a developmental state, or an island.

    Note here how Sweden and Denmark are so close to one another, despite the former having famously rejected the most aggressive social distancing and government lockdown measures. This might suggest that there is something about social compliance rather than the policies that governments implement. But these results do tell us something important about what kinds of states manage to contain the spread of COVID-19. And it is interesting to speculate how different these results would be if we actually had comprehensive testing in countries like the United States.

  • Null Results Monday: A Partisan Endorsement Experiment on COVID-19 in the United States

    Endorsement experiments are a common tool in contemporary political behavior research. One particular strength that they have is in testing the effects of “endorsements” on behaviors and attitudes as a way to see investigate how politics shapes mass attitudes. So for example, imagine reading the following sentence.

    Many people put ketchup on steak in order to improve the taste.

    and compare it to a slightly different version:

    Many people, including President Trump, put ketchup on steak in order to improve the taste.

    If you randomly assign people to read one of those two prompts, and then ask them questions such as “do you support putting ketchup on steak?” you can use this to tease out the effect of Trump’s “endorsement” by comparing across the ketchup-on-steak-by-Trump treatment and the ketchup-on-steak control. I have long thought (see here [PDF], especially pp. 433-435) that a key frontier for research in comparative political behavior is to translate that unbiased causal quantity (the effect of encountering the Trump treatment) into a substantively meaningful piece of political information, but that is a topic for another day.

    As part of an ongoing project with Shana Gadarian and Sara Goodman on the politics of COVID-19 in the United States, we recently conducted a multi-arm endorsement experiment to test the effects of partisan and political endorsements on mass attitudes. So, for example, do people support different policies if you provide them with information that the CDC has warned about COVID-19 versus with information that the CDC that has earned bipartisan political support has warned about COVID-19? Does it matter if we also add that President Trump has downplayed the threat? Does this affect their trust in politicians?

    What did we find?

    That’s right, nothing. Broadly speaking, no statistically significant effect on any policy preferences or trust in governmental institutions or politicians.

    You can read the full paper here. To channel MathNet*, the paper is not a fib, but it’s short.

    The paper raises some important questions about endorsement experiments as well as about the politics of COVID-19. We do not conclude that there is no partisan politics of COVID-19. But we do suggest that priming experiments face serious obstacles when implemented at the same time as a national crisis is unfolding, an especially in a cacophonous media environment. And although we do not speculate much beyond that, it is interesting to ask what value endorsement experiments would have if we were to conclude they only produce statistically significant treatment effects about issues that are not immediately politically salient.

    NOTE

    * Also, some good news: If you’re stuck at home with children and need some tools to help “teach them” math, all of the old episodes of Mathnet are on YouTube.