ABSTRACT

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has consistently dismissed the severity of COVID-19, failing to offer guidance and leadership to the governors of federative units responsible for containing the virus and making Brazil an illustrative case of societies most affected by the pandemic due to political negligence and inaction. This article presents a subnational analysis of Brazil’s federative units, examining the effects of policy responsiveness and political capacity on COVID-19 mortality. Specifically, this analysis identifies a conditional relationship between policy effectiveness and governments’ ability to reach and convince their populations to abide by policy recommendations, controlling for other leading explanations of COVID-19 severity (i.e. demographic characteristics, behavioral trends, and preparedness). This work implements subnational measures of political capacity to capture heterogeneity in government responses within the country. Results from random effects regression and a Generalized Additive Model add to recent findings on the role of effective governance in mitigating COVID-19 severity.

摘要

巴西总统贾尔·博尔索纳罗（Jair Bolsonaro）一直否认 COVID-19 的严重性，未能向负责控制病毒的联邦单位的州长提供指导和领导，并使巴西成为因政治疏忽和不作为而受疫情影响最严重的社会的例证. 本文介绍了对巴西联邦单位的次国家分析，研究了政策响应和政治能力对 COVID-19 死亡率的影响。具体而言，该分析确定了政策有效性与政府接触和说服民众遵守政策建议的能力之间的条件关系，控制了对 COVID-19 严重性的其他主要解释（即人口特征、行为趋势和准备情况）。这项工作实施了地方政治能力措施，以捕捉国内政府反应的异质性。随机效应回归和广义加法模型的结果增加了最近关于有效治理在减轻 COVID-19 严重性方面的作用的发现。