SPPA Associate Professor Mehdi Ammi
Political decisions have played a key role in the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the topic of a new paper by Associate Professor Mehdi Ammi and colleagues from Europe and Australia. Their paper investigates how political variables such as election and ideology affected the severity of the policy restrictions and the efficiency of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Italy and Spain. Contrary to the literature in other countries, they find that proximity to election increased the severity of the policy restrictions. This can be interpreted as reflecting expected voters’ priorities in two countries that were initially severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, they find that the ideological misalignment between central and regional governments led to more inefficient vaccine rollout. Taken together, these findings have important implications for the multilevel government context defining Canada: they suggest that a country specific investigation is needed to fully understand the impacts of politics on responses to COVID-19 and that differences in political ideology between federal and provincial governments may have led to missed opportunities when tackling the pandemic.
Check out the full paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168851024000927