When can Governments Innovate?: Analysis of Digital Approaches to Dealing with COVID-19

Seeking to curtail the spread of COVID-19 virus governments worldwide turned to digital technologies as the way to identify exposure to positively tested individuals as well as to enforce compliance with social distancing measures. Digital tracking of individuals using their mobile phones, surveillance drones, and security cameras proliferated across EU member states as well as other democratic countries as new counter-pandemic tools. The introduction of these tools has raised serious privacy concerns among some policy-makers at the EU institutions and member states as well as among civil rights watchdogs. As such the Western democracies have been divided on whether to adopt a centralized approach under which the government has access to data collected via a mobile app (e.g. Australia, France, UK) vs. decentralized one that grants individuals greater anonymity and control over which data are shared with the government (Austria, Estonia, Germany, and Ireland). Still others either refrained from using any technologies all together (e.g. Croatia, Slovenia) or pioneered completely new ways of keeping track of social interactions (e.g. New Zealand). The adoption of digital tracking tools points to a cross-country variation in their capacity to innovate. Why, when faced with the same crisis, some democracies were capable of innovation, whereas others were not? Why when implementing new technological solutions, some countries were more willing than others to sacrifice privacy for public health? This paper develops and tests an explanation that bridges together the literature on bureaucratic autonomy (Huber and Shipan 2002, Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991, Thiel and Yesilkagit 2011) with the literature on policy overreaction (Howlett 2014, De Francesco and Maggetti 2018, Maor 2012, 2014, 2017). Emergency laws that vested into the governments the authority to respond to pandemic varied in the extent of legislative and civilian oversight over the bodies that were responsible for addressing the crisis. Subsequently, the infringement on privacy was lower in the countries with greater oversight over crisis response. This variation in the institutional context affected the mechanism that led to regulatory overreaction and made policymakers more tolerant of technological solutions that infringed on privacy. The hypothesis are tested using fuzzy-set analysis of the original dataset of 32 consolidated democracies that comprises all EU member states as well as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, and the United States.