Institutional legacies and major policy change

Researchers in policy studies agree that public policies often change gradually and that country-specific historical trajectories are important. One popular version of this argument holds that historical policy decisions cast long shadows as they create feedback effects that institutionalize public policies towards stable institutional equilibria that tend to evolve slowly. Nevertheless, we know much less about how political legacies impact on major policy change, especially under conditions of uncertainty. In this paper, I argue that historical political institutions shape major policy changes even after their replacement. Not only do institutional legacies create feedback effects that lock in regime stability, but they also become heuristics for how decision-makers design a major policy change under uncertainty in the future. This is especially the case if decision-makers need to implement a major policy change under uncertainty. To examine this argument, I study the policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis and analyze the link between regime past and lock-down policies during times of crisis. I hold that countries with a past of authoritarian government are much more likely to impose stringent anti-crisis measures and restrictions on citizens' liberties compared to countries with a democratic legacy. Against the background of a major crisis, institutional legacies of past regimes are part of decision-makers’ “fast and frugal” heuristics, which shape decision-making. To empirically buttress my argument, I use multilevel regression models and show that countries with a past of authoritarian government are more likely to implement restrictive measures against COVID-19, regardless of infection rates and deaths, available hospital beds, efficiency of government, decentralization, the current state of democracy as well as other control variables. Furthermore, the paper explores whether such a transference of institutional policy contexts might spill over beyond specific policy practices. Therefore, I compare the development of democracy before and after the "Spanish Flu'' of 1918-1920, in using interrupted time series models. My findings suggest that it is unlikely that this historic pandemic contributed significantly to the decline of democracy. The results of this research indicate that past rather than present regime forms explain lockdown stringency. In addition, anti-pandemic policies do not seem to cause a decline of democracy but rather reinforce pre-existing trends in regime development. More generally, this research contributes to policy analysis by demonstrating that institutional legacies contribute to major policy changes even after their replacement.