The race against Covid: A global study of administrative capacities, fragmentation and traditions

[Submission for the panel “Administrative Responses to Crises”] In early 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic spread quickly and soon affected virtually all countries in the world. The pandemic constitutes an external shock, an unpredictable crisis that required swift government reactions. However, government measures differed significantly in timing and severity, and this had a considerable impact on case numbers and death rates. Public administration scholars’ early analyses of the determinants of government measures against the spread of the virus are anecdotal or based on small to medium numbers of cases. Nevertheless, these analyses raise some interesting hypotheses. The present study tests several of these hypotheses in a global sample of more than 100 countries and through regression analysis. Firstly, it investigates the contested effect of administrative capacities on government responses. While some early analyses concluded that states with strong capacities reacted more quickly, others found a negative effect. Secondly, the study investigates the effect of administrative fragmentation; it disentangles horizontal fragmentation and specialization (the existence of a separate health ministry) and vertical fragmentation and decentralization. Thirdly, the study analyzes the effect of past experiences that are expected to shape how governments think and act: administrative traditions and learning from previous epidemics. To study the effects of these factors, the analysis builds on several output indicators that reflect the policies and measures adopted by governments and their timing. Given the exogenous nature of the pandemic, the risk of endogenity is low. Potential omitted variable bias is minimized by the use of region fixed-effects and relevant country-level controls for economic, demographic and political factors. This study makes a significant contribution to the literature on crisis management. Rarely, if ever, have crises hit many countries in such a comparable and simultaneous manner, yet extant studies have not fully leveraged this extraordinary empirical setting. While crisis management research has largely relied on single case studies, the present paper studies several potential determinants of (successful) crisis management in a comparative manner. More generally, the paper advances comparative public administration research. This is the first study, to the best of my knowledge, that tests the effects of some widely discussed administrative factors systematically with a large-N approach that covers the majority of countries in the world. By studying political and administrative factors simultaneously and not only in the “usual” OECD context, this study is an important advancement towards truly comparative public administration research.