| dc.description.abstract | The COVID-19 pandemic has swept across the world, and as of April 2021, over 136 million individuals have been infected, and close to 3 million have died due to the virus. While vaccines have been developed and distributed in record time, the virus has revealed weaknesses present in democratic and global institutions that have been traditionally viewed as the gold standard for public health policy. In the past year, there have been striking trends in how countries are able to successfully combat the virus. These trends have spurred researchers to study how factors such as regime type, wealth, policies implemented, and more affect the relative success in combatting the pandemic. Policies such as lockdowns, shelter-in-place orders, mask mandates, contact tracing, social-distancing mandates, etc. have been implemented in various countries with various results. Authoritarian countries seem to be doing a better job in managing the spread of the virus compared to democracies due to their ability to implement more stringent, restrictive policies, and developed countries such as the United States or those in Europe have had comparatively higher cases than developing countries. The goal of this research project is to determine which factors are most effective in reducing the number of COVID-19 cases by analyzing the effect of regime type of countries on the types of policies enacted and the number of COVID-19 cases by creating and applying regression models. | en |
