Table 4.

Political economy of COVID-19 responses.

	(1)	(2)
	Policy stringency	Policy stringency
Log number of COVID-19 cases	0.0763***	0.101***
	[0.00616]	[0.0362]
Cases $\times$ democracy (Polity)	-0.00776***	-0.0719***
	[0.00213]	[0.0218]
Cases $\times$ democracy $\times$ welfare system	0.000832**
	[0.000369]
Cases $\times$ democracy $\times$ trust in politicians		0.0182***
		[0.00647]
Observations	5155	2049
R-squared	0.889	0.950
Number of countries	83	20
Controls	$✓$	$✓$
Country FE	$✓$	$✓$
Time FE	$✓$	$✓$

Notes: This table presents OLS estimates from regressing the policy stringency index on the log number of COVID-19 infections interacted with the Polity index of democracy, as well as a triple interaction with measures of the generosity of the welfare state (column 1), and trust in politicians (column 2). All specifications include a time varying index of the intensity of testing policy, an interaction between infections and: i) log GDP per capita; ii) mobile phone subscriptions per hundred people; iii) a dummy equal to 1 if a country scores below the average value of an index of government accountability and transparency; and iv) a dummy equal to 1 if a country has experienced more than fifty SARS or MERS cases. Errors are clustered at the country-level. The coefficients with ${}^{★}{}^{★}{}^{★}$ are significant at the 1% level, with ${}^{★}{}^{★}$ are significant at the 5% level, and with ${}^{★}$ are significant at the 10% level.