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      The value conflict between freedom and security: Explaining the variation of COVID-19 policies in democracies and autocracies

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      PLoS ONE
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          Abstract

          In the name of health security, individual freedoms were constrained in an unprecedented way in many countries, democratic or authoritarian, all over the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet the constraints have not been consistent across countries, which motivates this paper to examine the relevance of value preferences towards freedom or security in the society for COVID-19 policies. Based on data for 40 democratic and authoritarian countries, the analyses show that the variation in the stringency of COVID-19 policies can be explained by value preferences of the population only in autocracies. In democracies, however, we do not find such a relationship. Governments in democratic political systems, we argue, are responsive to their constitutions and face prosecution by the judiciary if they violate the law or provisions of the constitution, limiting their capacity to implement strong COVID-19 policies. Nevertheless, their COVID-19 policies restricted citizens’ freedoms and liberties, which means that these policies were rather not responsive to citizens’ preferences for freedom, democratic rights and liberties. By highlighting how autocracies respond to their citizens’ value preferences for security, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how autocracies might gain legitimacy in times of crises.

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          A global panel database of pandemic policies (Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker)

          COVID-19 has prompted unprecedented government action around the world. We introduce the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT), a dataset that addresses the need for continuously updated, readily usable and comparable information on policy measures. From 1 January 2020, the data capture government policies related to closure and containment, health and economic policy for more than 180 countries, plus several countries' subnational jurisdictions. Policy responses are recorded on ordinal or continuous scales for 19 policy areas, capturing variation in degree of response. We present two motivating applications of the data, highlighting patterns in the timing of policy adoption and subsequent policy easing and reimposition, and illustrating how the data can be combined with behavioural and epidemiological indicators. This database enables researchers and policymakers to explore the empirical effects of policy responses on the spread of COVID-19 cases and deaths, as well as on economic and social welfare.
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            Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Funding acquisitionRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: Project administrationRole: SupervisionRole: ValidationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: ValidationRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: Project administrationRole: SupervisionRole: ValidationRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS One
                plos
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                9 September 2022
                2022
                9 September 2022
                : 17
                : 9
                : e0274270
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany
                [2 ] Department of Sociology, University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany
                [3 ] The State Institute for Family Research (ifb), Bamberg, Germany
                University of Catania, ITALY
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4148-7022
                Article
                PONE-D-22-02299
                10.1371/journal.pone.0274270
                9462556
                36083998
                335d41a9-c086-4cde-a99b-671f59a63424
                © 2022 Saam et al

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 24 January 2022
                : 24 August 2022
                Page count
                Figures: 2, Tables: 3, Pages: 17
                Funding
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100007306, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften;
                Award Recipient :
                This study was funded by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences ad hoc-group grant to the project ‚Zukunftswerte‘ (2019-2022; https://zukunftswerte.badw.de/en/working-group.html). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Social Sciences
                Political Science
                Democracy
                Medicine and Health Sciences
                Medical Conditions
                Infectious Diseases
                Viral Diseases
                Covid 19
                Social Sciences
                Political Science
                National Security
                Medicine and Health Sciences
                Epidemiology
                Pandemics
                Social Sciences
                Political Science
                Governments
                Medicine and Health Sciences
                Health Care
                Health Care Policy
                Social Sciences
                Economics
                Economic Analysis
                Social Sciences
                Sociology
                Social Systems
                Custom metadata
                The data underlying the results presented in the study are available from the World Values Survey (WVS) research program ( https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp) and from the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) project ( https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/covid-19-government-response-tracker). The authors confirm that the data is third-party data and that they had no special access privileges other researchers would not have. The data files can be downloaded without restrictions.
                COVID-19

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                Uncategorized

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