Thread by @DToshkov

What accounts for the variation in the policy responses of European countries to the #coronavirus? Why some states acted faster than others?
Here are some provisional answers:
(1) Government effectiveness is strongly *negatively* correlated with the speed of the policy response

(2) Countries with higher aggregate freedom scores have been slower in closing schools and imposing national lockdowns

(3) Interpersonal trust in society is strongly related with the policy response: the higher the interpersonal trust, the more time the countries took to impose restrictive measures!

Some other variables show significant effects as well: regionalism and the authoritarian positions of governing parties, for example. But many other suspected predictors do not, such as left-right party positions, number of parties in government, etc.

The graphs in this thread are just a tease: we examine 3 policy measures using 3 different modeling strategies: occurrence of policy decision as a function of number of cases; number of cases at time of decision; and survival analysis of time from first case till policy decision.

Results are pretty consistent across policy measure and modeling strategy. We will post a pre-print with details this week.

Stay tuned!

This is joint work with Kutsal Yesilkagit and Brendan Carroll from @PA_UniLeiden @fggaleiden

A couple more startling results w. @arifkutsal:
- countries generally better in taking advice from experts (SGI score) were significantly *slower* in their responses to #COVIDー19
- but governments where the health ministers were medical doctors acted marginally faster.