Abstract:

This research examines the impact of government ideology on fighting the COVID-19 pandemic based on the daily data of 143 countries from January 1, 2020 to January 31, 2021. By using the panel corrected standard errors model, the results show that a right-wing ruling party is linked with a greater number of new daily confirmed cases and deaths of COVID-19. This impact also appears in the samples of non-OECD countries and Asian countries, and the impact of government ideology on the COVID-19 epidemic is more pronounced in Asian countries. Moreover, we find that government ideology had no effect on COVID-19 before March 11, 2020, while after that time it played a significant role in controlling the epidemic, because of the announcement of a “global pandemic” from the World Health Organization on March 11. In sum, our findings deepen the understanding of the relationship between government ideology and COVID-19 epidemic.