Legislative incapacity and underreporting of COVID-19 mortality.

The prevalent interpretation of COVID-19 mortality underreporting typically focuses on authoritarian regimes' propensity for data manipulation. This study, however, posits that the demand side is integral to enhancing the veracity of COVID-19 mortality figures. Through quantitative analysis, it is demonstrated that legislative oversight of the executive significantly correlates with the divergence between excess mortality and officially reported COVID-19 mortality. Moreover, such oversight is shown to bolster the influence of bureaucratic capacity on the precision of mortality data. Consequently, these findings suggest that the notion of "autocratic advantage" in COVID-19 management is not solely a byproduct of regime-led data falsification but also a reflection of deficiencies in legislative and bureaucratic capacities.

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© 2024 Published by Elsevier Inc.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.