Authoritarianism vs. democracy: Simulating responses to disease outbreaks

TL;DR

This paper explores how different political systems, specifically authoritarian versus democratic, respond to disease outbreaks by simulating decision-making processes and examining the trade-offs between rapid action and pluralism.

Contribution

It introduces a modified model to simulate decision-making in various institutional contexts during health crises, highlighting the impact of political pluralism and institutional maturity.

Findings

Political pluralism does not always hinder emergency management.

Mature political debate can lead to effective responses regardless of regime type.

Institutional frameworks influence the speed and quality of decisions during outbreaks.

Abstract

Disease outbreaks force the governments to rapid decisions to deal with. However, the rapid stream of decision-making could be costly in terms of the democratic representativeness. The aim of the paper is to investigate the trade-off between pluralism of preferences and the time required to approach a decision. To this aim we develop and test a modified version of the Hegselmann and Krause (2002) model to capture these two characteristics of the decisional process in different institutional contexts. Using a twofold geometrical institutional setting, we simulate the impact of disease outbreaks to check whether countries exhibits idiosyncratic effects, depending on their institutional frameworks. Main findings show that the degree of pluralism in political decisions is not necessarily associated with worse performances in managing emergencies, provided that the political debate is mature enough.