The Peregrine findings on hierarchical complexity really stuck with me. I've been thinking alot about how centralized crisis response tends to optimize for short term visibility but breaks down when sustained adaptation is needed. The Denmark vs China covid comparison is a good illustration, though I wonder if theres a selection bias in wich types of crises get documented historically since more flexible societies might prevent things from becoming crises in the first place.
Yeah that's a problem that we never see the crisis that was prevented. Though, this is exactly what Hoyer et al (2024), described above, tried to do. You can find their whole paper here if you are interested: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/hyj48 It's quite readable.
When we looked at Covid-19 outcomes in a quite robust way compared to early-in-covid studies, using published pre-Covid metrics for democracy (V-Dem 2019), ie nothing subjective, basically prospective, we found democracy associated with less excess mortality. The effect persisted when separating islands from non-islands, but the direct association disappeared in non-islands when controlling for wealth, degree of pandemic preparedness, and population size. Upshot: democracy definitely seemed to be associated with less death in islands (robustly, and in fully controlled models) and in non-islands the effect was there, but looks mediated via eg strategy selection, implementation dynamics etc. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.22.26344652v1
Hmmm yeah that's true. You can never completely rule out something like this. However, I haven't really found any good studies, that show with lots of data that Autocracies are actually better at crisis management. Also, some points like democracies being much more open in their crisis planning and preparation don't have much leeway for massaging of the data.
That makes sense. Though you wouldn't have to show autocracies are better, just that democracies are not better in a statistically significant way, which would be a much lower threshold.
The Peregrine findings on hierarchical complexity really stuck with me. I've been thinking alot about how centralized crisis response tends to optimize for short term visibility but breaks down when sustained adaptation is needed. The Denmark vs China covid comparison is a good illustration, though I wonder if theres a selection bias in wich types of crises get documented historically since more flexible societies might prevent things from becoming crises in the first place.
Yeah that's a problem that we never see the crisis that was prevented. Though, this is exactly what Hoyer et al (2024), described above, tried to do. You can find their whole paper here if you are interested: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/hyj48 It's quite readable.
Random thought, to what degree would you guess these results of historical research indicating higher resilience of democracies are due to political bias of the researchers? See e.g. https://www.psypost.org/158-scientists-used-the-same-data-but-their-politics-predicted-the-results
Seems like this type of research would involve a large degree of judgement calls that lends itself to introducing subconscious bias.
When we looked at Covid-19 outcomes in a quite robust way compared to early-in-covid studies, using published pre-Covid metrics for democracy (V-Dem 2019), ie nothing subjective, basically prospective, we found democracy associated with less excess mortality. The effect persisted when separating islands from non-islands, but the direct association disappeared in non-islands when controlling for wealth, degree of pandemic preparedness, and population size. Upshot: democracy definitely seemed to be associated with less death in islands (robustly, and in fully controlled models) and in non-islands the effect was there, but looks mediated via eg strategy selection, implementation dynamics etc. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.22.26344652v1
Hmmm yeah that's true. You can never completely rule out something like this. However, I haven't really found any good studies, that show with lots of data that Autocracies are actually better at crisis management. Also, some points like democracies being much more open in their crisis planning and preparation don't have much leeway for massaging of the data.
That makes sense. Though you wouldn't have to show autocracies are better, just that democracies are not better in a statistically significant way, which would be a much lower threshold.
Yeah true, but haven't seen one like that either.