Varieties of resilience and side effects of disobedience: cross-national patterns of survival during the coronavirus pandemic

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic allows us to test several hypotheses regarding state capacity and power by using a group of thirty-one Eurasian countries. These countries vary on a number of potentially relevant causal variables such as population density; proximity to the earliest epicenters of the pandemic; health spending; ethnoreligious diversity; dominant religious tradition; level of democracy; and the prevalence of smoking. We compare fatality rates five months after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak to be a pandemic, and focus on governmental policies and outcomes in four paired comparisons: Albania and Kosovo; Belarus and Lithuania; Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan; and Greece and Turkey.