Authoritarianism vs. democracy: Simulating responses to disease outbreaks

Disease outbreaks force the governments to rapid decisions. However, the stream of decision-making could be costly in terms of the democratic representativeness. The goal of the paper is to investigate the trade-off between pluralism of preferences and the time required to approach a decision. To this aim we develop and test a modified version of the Hegselmann and Krause (2002) model to capture these two characteristics of the decisional process in different institutional contexts. Using a twofold geometrical institutional setting, we simulate the impact of disease outbreaks to check whether countries exhibit idiosyncratic effects, depending on their institutional frameworks. Main findings are that the degree of pluralism is not necessarily associated with worse performances in managing emergencies, provided that the political debate is mature enough.