Good morning and welcome, everyone. Um, uh, I'd like to welcome you to, um, the current installment of our COVID-19 e-seminar series on the, uh, politics of pandemics. Um, since it's 9 o'clock, I figured that we should get started without further ado. And also because, um, of how, um, busy everyone is these days with all of the things that we're doing in our own ways to try to support and, uh, Uh, and, and respond to the COVID-19 emergency. Um, so the topic of our, uh, our e-seminar today is the politics of pandemics. It's a great pleasure to, um, introduce, uh, the two speakers that we have lined up. Um, our, our first speaker is, uh, Felipe Campante from, uh, Johns Hopkins, uh, SIS. Um, he's the Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor there, and he has worked and published extensively in political economy, development, economics, and regional and urban issues. Um, and, uh, he'll be, uh, uh, sharing with us, um, insights from his research on how the Ebola epidemic, um, a couple of years ago affected, um, affected and influenced politics. Um, our second speaker is our very own Stuti Kamani. Uh, who is a senior economist in the Development Research Group in the World Bank. Um, she is, uh, uh, joined in the early 2000s and has been, uh, working in DCRG on, um, On a variety of topics relating to the political economy of development. And, you know, most notably, a, uh, was the lead author of a recent policy research report on making politics work for development. Um, and then just to, uh, not have an interruption in the flow, I'll also just jump ahead and welcome our discussant as well. Our discussant is Antonio Spilibergo. He's the deputy director in the Research Department at the IMF, um, And, uh, Antonio has a long and distinguished career both in research and in operations in the fund and has uh an incredibly uh prolific and diverse set of research uh research interests, um, political economy being one of them. So it's a pleasure to have, um, uh, such a great lineup for today's, uh, for today's seminar. I believe we're gonna start with um uh Felipe, uh, for about 20 minutes, uh, followed by Stuy for about 20 minutes. Um, and then we'll go straight to Antonio for discussion, uh, 10 or 15 minutes, and then we'll open up, uh, for, uh, for comments and, and questions from, uh, all of you wherever you're joining us. Um, what I, um, uh, what I'll do, uh, Felipe and Stutti is I'll give you both kind of a five-minute warning, um, just to, to help, uh, help you to stay on top of the time. Uh, so without further ado, um, over to you, Felipe. Uh, thank you very much, uh, Art. I hope you can all hear me. Uh, let me share my, uh, slides, uh. OK, I think you, you can all see that, right? Uh, so, uh, this is a great pleasure to be here. Uh, uh, thanks a lot for, uh, for the opportunity. And this is a project that I've, uh, Uh, I had been, uh, working on with Emilio del Petris Chauvin, uh, and Ruben Durante, and, and, you know, the, the, the, the COVID. Uh, the emergence of the COVID, uh, uh, crisis or just, you know, made this, uh, uh, uh, more urgent and, and, and it's great to kind of be able to, to contribute to, uh, to the debate here. So, uh, you know, the way I like to think about this is if, if you, if you think about the political impact of a pandemic, um, and COVID-19 in particular, which is an enormous Example, right? It's a huge shock. Uh, first of all, it's, it's, it's such, it's so huge that it's kind of hard to think that it won't have, uh, uh, political electoral effects in this country, in the US and, and, uh, uh, um, elsewhere as well. And I, and I think there are 3 different dimensions that we can, uh, explore here, two of which I think we understand a little bit better. So on the one hand, There's the economic dimension, uh, as we all know, it's, it's, you know, we're, we're right now going through a major economic downturn. There's gonna be a, a, a tremendous fallout from this. And we understand, uh, that economic shocks have, uh, uh, uh, uh, electoral impacts. In the US in particular, it's, it's, it's a widely studied topic, but, but even more broadly. Now, there's a second dimension which I would call the policy dimension, which is COVID is, uh requiring an enormous policy response, and it's natural that incumbents would be judged by their response to the crisis. People will update their views on incumbents based on their response to the crisis. This may actually have one dimension, which is so, so-called rally around the flag dimension, right? In a moment of crisis, people have a tendency to try and, and, and uh uh uh uh you know, rally around the, the, the incumbents, so to speak. That may be a part of this. But, but there's this big policy component and this is obviously still unfolding. Because the policy response is, is unfolding. But there's a third element which I would argue is, is, is not as well understood as the other two, which is sort of the psychological impact, right? So there's, there's a threat out there, uh, uh, a multifaceted threat, you know, starting with the, uh, uh, just the virus itself. And that can in itself affect the behavior of voters, and this is what we are going to look at specifically in this research. So if you think about the role of emotions in politics and in particular the role of fear as a particularly powerful emotion. It's, it's, it's quite, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, you know, it makes a lot of sense. People talk a lot about how, uh, these are powerful tools for, for, for influencing voting behavior, and politicians, you know, uh, uh, anecdotally, it's, it's, it's quite clear that, that they use fear to mobilize voters, uh, often against sort of external threats, be it, you know, immigrants or terrorism or, or, or whatever the case may be. And there is a, a, a substantial body of work, uh, uh, mostly kind of coming from uh lab experiments about the impact that just priming sentiments of fear of anxiety may have, uh, but our real-world evidence is, is, is a bit more complicated because, uh, from an empirical perspective, it's kind of hard to disentangle the impact of fear from other factors precisely because whenever there's a, a, a, a shock that triggers that in, in practice. It often requires a policy response. So all of those uh uh uh different elements that I've just alluded to are present as well. So disentangling that is, is complicated. So what we do in this paper is to look at the impact of the Ebola outbreak in 2014, which as I'm gonna uh uh uh go over happened uh right before or, or reached the US uh right before uh uh uh the US midterm elections of that year. And this gives us a very unique context to look at this uh uh um fear aspect because the perceived threat was quite high. It, it had a, a, a very stark impact. course, but the actual risks or the, the, the, the effect it had on sort of the public health environment was quite low. So unlike what we're having now, it, it, it, we can sort of isolate the fear, uh, uh a shock from these other dimensions for the most part, which, which typically. Complicate the, the, the, uh, the inference. So just to give you some context, you may remember in 2014, there was this uh a very important Ebola outbreak centered in West Africa. So we can see here, this is uh Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, and it was a very uh uh uh important public health shock in these countries. So we see like thousands of cases, as you all know, uh, uh, it's a disease with very high mortality, no effective treatment. And if we look at sort of how it spread across different places, massive shock in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, not so much elsewhere, right? And in particular if you look at the United States, there were a total of 4 cases, 1 death. Among these cases. And just to give you a comparison, if you look at the 2009 influenza, not, not even to mention what we're going through right now, it's just a completely different order of magnitude, right? So this, this was not a major public health shock in the US. However, it was a major, you know, media episode in the US, right? So these are just a couple of uh uh uh screenshots and, and, and pictures from back in the day. So, There was, you know, a lot of panic surrounding Ebola, as I suppose many of you might, might remember. If you just look at the numbers here on the left-hand side, we see uh the, the network news and the right-hand side, the cable news. So there was this, uh uh uh, you know, pretty a sharp peak of news and discussion about Ebola, and the vertical red line there is election, is election week, right? So the midterm elections. So this was happening right before the election or the month before the election. So, you know, it, it, it, it happened. In the moment that sort of maximize the, the electoral, the potential electoral impact at that point in time. So what we're going to do is use this to ask a number of questions and try to answer them. So, first of all, did that panic influence voters? If it did, in which direction? So in particular, which party benefited from that effect? And then we wanna ask uh uh how, right? So what were the mechanisms involved and, and in particular, uh were there uh sort of uh uh or was there a strategic uh uh uh um Behavior by politicians kind of using that. If so, how and, and, and, and how effective, right? And obviously, like we need first to, to kind of try and figure out sort of the causal uh uh impact here. How do we know that Ebola caused all of this? And then how do, you know, for, for that we need to figure out like how do we measure the, the extent of the Ebola panic, if you will. And, and, and this is what we do here. So, for uh uh uh. You know, our, our uh causal identification, we're going to exploit the timing and the location of Ebola cases in the US. So, first case, late September, was one individual, Liberian national who was visiting the US and was diagnosed with Ebola, and he was in Dallas, Texas. Uh, soon afterwards, uh, one of the nurses that, so two nurses actually tested positive, uh, nurses who had assisted, uh, uh, this patient tested positive, and this nurse, in particular, she had traveled to Akron, Ohio in between, uh, uh, uh, you know, Being infected and uh being diagnosed. And finally, there was uh uh uh a doctor who had been working in Guinea sort of trying to help uh in the crisis and was diagnosed once he, he was back in New York City. So these were the cases. So we have this sort of geographical uh uh uh uh um arguably sort of uh uh You know, idiosyncratic, uh, I'm gonna, uh, uh, talk a little bit more about that, uh, exposure to, uh, the cases across the US. I'm gonna try to exploit that and the timing to, uh, uh, uh, get at the, the, the causal impact of the Ebola concerns. So just to give you a sense of then how, how we can measure, uh, Ebola concerns. So 111 thing that we do is to look at Google searches for the term Ebola. And as you can see, the prevalence of Google searches is, is very much kind of correlated with the geographical uh uh uh um Exposure to these cases, right? So, you know, large dark blue uh uh uh areas around Dallas, uh, Cleveland, Akron, and, uh, New York City. And uh so this is kind of indicating that there is this uh uh uh uh um effect of proximity to Ebola cases and the degree of concern with Ebola cases. And we can do that for tweets as well. So tweets, uh, uh, with the word Ebola or hashtag Ebola, you see kind of a similar, uh, uh, a similar picture here. Now, if we look at the timing, we see that, you know, there was this geographic pattern uh uh associated with the specific timing as well. So the green here are searches that are uh uh um uh in Texas, and we see that they peak once there's the first case in Dallas. Then the You know, the first case travels to Cleveland, then there's a peak in the red line, which is the Ohio searches and Dallas peaks back as well. And then there's a blue peak here in New York City right after the, the, the first case in New York. So as people get exposed, the concern rise uh uh uh uh rises, and we can kind of pick that up using those uh measures of uh online activity, OK? And here is uh the, the, the figure for tweets as well. So, you know, same, same idea. Now, uh, uh, so what we're gonna do then is to use the distance to the nearest Ebola case as a predict a predictor of Ebola concerns, right? So as an instrument for Ebola concerns, and we show that uh conditional and sort of uh previous uh uh um electoral outcomes. So it's, it's, it's basically uncorrelated with previous. Electoral outcomes. It's uncorrelated with Ebola concerns before the, the, the, the cases emerged. So it's not as if these areas somehow would be more prone to worry about Ebola or these areas or proximity kind of picks up something about like you're more likely to vote Democrat or Republican. Uh, we show that this is not the case for, for previous outcomes. And the first key finding is that greater Ebola concerns led to lower, to a lower Democratic vote share in the midterm elections at the House, Senate, and gubernatorial levels, right? So there are the Democrats were, were harmed by the Ebola, by. Of the prevalence of Ebola concerns. And just to give you a, a, a quantitative idea of the, of the size of the effect, if you take a one standard deviation increase in the concerns as measured, you know, both by uh searches and by tweets, this led to a 4.3% point drop in the Democratic vote share and You know, this would have swung 15 House races. So this is for House elections. The numbers are similar for Senate and, and, and gubernatorial elections. So this would have swung uh 15 races that were won by the Republicans. Which, uh, uh, uh, basically would have wiped out all the gains that the GOP had between 2010 and 2014, which were like, so they increased their majority by 13 seats. So it, it, it's a, it's a sizable impact uh that we're talking about here. So that's the first, the first, uh uh uh key result. Now, you may wonder, uh, maybe this was associated to an effect where voters were, uh, um. Disappointed with the incumbent's reaction or, or just kind of some uh uh uh immediate uh uh response that the panic kind of gets projected onto the incumbents and, you know, the first thing to note is we see no effect on, on Republican incumbents, so that's uh the first thing here. But you may wonder, uh, perhaps it was about Obama being the incumbent that people had in mind, right? And if you think uh and, and go back to the, to, to, to, to that time. There was this perception, right? So these are headlines from, from, from uh uh that month. So is Ebola, Obama's Katrina moment, President Obama's Ebola problem, and you even had some uh celebrities at the time who were kind of uh uh uh criticizing President Obama about the response to the Ebola crisis. So that was uh uh uh uh uh a thing. Back in the day, well, we actually find using the daily variation in Gallup ratings that asks about uh uh approval or disapproval over the president, and there's basically a precisely estimated zero effect on Obama's approval rating. OK, so there was like, there was no effect. On Obama's approval rating. And this, I guess, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, kind of provides some evidence that there isn't sort of this automatic impact uh uh of sort of the, the, that uh um fear related to the, to the epidemic projected on the incumbent, and I think that's something that uh uh uh is important to keep in mind uh for the, for the current context. But then, like what was driving this effect then? Uh, Perhaps politicians were kind of trying to, to, to make use of that, uh of that episode. And this is just one example, uh we have, you know, others in the paper, it's just very easy to find. So this is Senator Rand Paul, uh, at the time saying, you know, Uh, Ebola, this major threat, and, and, and crucially kind of making this association with the border and, and immigration and, and tying these, uh, topics together, right? So the idea that you have this foreign disease that can come and, and kind of, uh, you know, building this association here, I think is also something that's quite important. Uh, uh, and I'm gonna get back to this. So, so there was, uh, there's a perception that this was exploited at the time. And we can see this uh in the data, right? So this is one example. So members of Congress, they, they can send newsletters to their constituents and they do, and, and, and we can look at the text of these newsletters and what we find here is that immediately once you have the first case in the US there's this big jump in The solid line with mentions of Ebola in newsletters from Republicans. The solid blue line is from Democrats, so you see it's, it's much more by Republicans. And the dashed line here uh with the axis uh uh uh uh right on, on the right are the newsletters that are talking about Ebola and immigration at the same time, right? So it's not just that Republicans are talking about Ebola, they're talking about that in association. with specific topics, as illustrated by the Rand Paul quote. And uh uh we can look at, at sort of exploit that timing, and we see that Republicans start sending more newsletters mentioning Ebola after the first case. Uh, in particular, Republicans in competitive races start sending more newsletters disproportionately, so that's sort of indicating that there is a strategic uh uh motive here and it's not just about Republicans. Uh, you know, being more concerned in general or, uh, uh, uh, representing places that are likely to be more concerned. And they are doing that in association with certain topics, in particular, immigration and Obama, right? So that's important because they're talking about immigration, they're talking about Obama and we've already seen that the Obama angle, you know, maybe, maybe didn't work, uh, quite, uh, uh, uh, quite so much, OK? Now, we can look at campaign ads, and for ads, we can, uh, uh, uh, um. We don't have or we haven't yet uh exploited the text of the ads, but we do have a measure of the fear content of ads which is using uh uh the use of ominous music and other sort of fear cues. And what we see here is again that, well, both parties are kind of uh exploiting fear and kind of increases after the, the, the, the um. The first Ebola case, but the association with fear and immigration again is something that the Republicans are doing and the Democrats like not quite as much, right? So there is this associate this, this kind of strategic association. And we look at the data uh more systematically and we see the same thing. So Republicans start broadcasting more, more ads disproportionately, again, more so in competitive races, responding to the, to the, to the proximity. So Republicans in places kind of closer will uh do that more as well. And again, in association with immigration, in association with Obama as well. OK? Now, Phillippe, I'll just jump in, give you a 5 minute warning. OK, thanks so much. I think I'm, I think I'm good. Uh, so, Then the question is, uh, did it work? And, and, you know, here it, it's, it's a little bit uh complicated to, to, to pinpoint the specific effect of the, of the, of the strategy, but we can see, uh, uh, sort of the, the, the change in voters' uh reported attitudes. And I think it's particularly interesting because of the lab evidence about the effect of like priming fear and anxiety. Is that it, it, it tends to make people kind of more conservative. So one question is like, did Ebola make voters just kind of more conservative across the board? And what we see here is if we look at the congressional uh uh um uh ele um election survey, we see Across a number of different topics kind of related to sort of uh uh conservative uh uh uh uh issues uh in, in the US and so just conservative leanings in general, we see no effect, so no effect of like general uh uh uh uh break towards uh uh conservatism, but we did see an effect about immigration. So not about Obama again, cause, you know, consistent with the, with the Gallup uh data, nothing on the Obama front, nothing much on, you know, whether you're pro-gun or anti-gay marriage or, or, or whether you identify as conservative, but there is this increase in, in anti-immigrant uh sentiment. So the, the, the closest you are to an Obama case, uh, to, to an Ebola case, I'm sorry. Uh, uh, you know, that, uh, is associated with voters becoming more anti-immigration, right? So just to, to, to summarize, uh, we find a significant effect of fear on voting and favoring Republicans over Democrats, sort of, uh, uh, uh, uh, in an important magnitude, but this was not driven by general disappointment with the incumbent or sort of an association with the incumbent. Even though uh uh uh that was Republicans tried to, to create that association, right? Uh, but it doesn't seem to have worked, right? And it, it doesn't seem to, to have been driven by voters just becoming generally more conservative. Uh, instead, there is evidence of that strategic behavior kind of trying to, to, to, to tie Ebola to other issues, and it seems that the issue of immigration was the one that seemed to stick, right? So this is kind of the, the, the basic message that comes out of uh uh uh the paper. So then, I guess the, the, the immediate and pressing question is what does it mean now if we think about the, the, the COVID shock? And the first thing to note here is that There are very important differences because the, the, you know, if you go back to, to what, to the distinction that I was trying to raise between the economic, the policy, and sort of the psychological uh uh dimensions. Obviously, the, the economic and policy shocks are, are much, much bigger now because now, like you do have uh uh uh uh the kind of disruption that we're witnessing, which is, which is pretty uh uh uh unprecedented in, in, in sort of our, our lifetimes. Uh, so it's, it's just gonna be much bigger on that front. But by the same token, the fear factor uh should be much bigger now as well, right? Because The actual change in the in the public health environment and the threat that that this actually represents is a lot bigger now than it was in the case of Ebola. So you might say like, you know, this, this could also be considerably larger now. And here I think there are some, some important similarities, right, because it's also like a foreign disease, quote unquote, like something that is coming from the outside, right? So in that sense, it is very much kind of comparable to, to, to, to the, the type of uh uh uh uh uh threat uh that Ebola kind of uh represented back in the day. And you can clearly see, I think right now that there is, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, you know, you can see some attempts of kind of trying to use a similar playbook, right? So kind of trying to build an association with, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, you know, foreigners, uh, you know, the Chinese virus, uh, the Wuhan virus, or whatever that, uh, uh, uh, you can see politicians kind of trying to do, and, and, and so. This, uh, uh, um, playing it against China or against, you know, foreign institutions, now I, you know, the WHO or, or what have you. So this, this, uh, uh, uh, strategy, I think, of, uh, building these associations, uh, seems to be, uh, uh, uh, uh, it seems like it's being tried again. And, and the evidence that we find from Ebola is that it seems to have, uh, to have worked. It seems to have resonated, uh, with voters back then. So, uh, we might anticipate that there's a chance that this could, uh, play out as well, uh, uh, along this dimension. Now, the key question that then I think, uh, uh, uh, uh, we need to think about is Are there other associations that are possible here? Uh, uh, uh, and if you think about like the way politicians are going to respond to that, and, you know, uh, uh, I think Republicans are, are, are kind of going in this direction, uh, uh, which uh seems to have worked, uh, back then. But more broadly and for, for, for Democrats, uh, uh, you know, are there other associations? And I think the, the, the key message here is that it's not quite automatic, right? So, so, you know, Republicans tried certain types of associations that seem, you know, don't seem to have worked, uh, uh, uh, back then. So, uh, it, it needs to be something, or at least that's one interpretation that, that, that I think is plausible. It needs to be something that kind of resonates with voters in a way that, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. You know, make sense in their minds, right? So this idea that You know, this is a disease that's coming from abroad, therefore, you know, the association with immigration kind of makes sense. Uh, uh, you would have to think about whether there are other associations that quote unquote, make sense, uh, uh, in the same way, right? So I think The, the, the, the things to look at are, uh, uh, uh, you know, these, uh, uh, you know, possible associations that, that may or may not be present and whether politicians are going to try to, to, to latch on to, to other things. So I think in general, it's, it's quite uh uh uh uh overwhelmingly likely, I think that there's gonna be be some uh uh impact. And, uh, uh, not just because of, of sort of the huge economic and, and, and, and policy shock that COVID represents, but because of these uh psychological associations, uh, as well. So I'm just gonna stop here and, and looking forward to the, the, the questions. Wonderful. Thanks a lot, Felipe. Um, let's, uh, go over to Stie. Uh, you're up, Study. And Stti, uh, your unit. Great. Yes, yes. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Hope everyone's staying safe and well. Uh, my presentation is uh on examining the relationship between governance and the success of policies to manage the pandemic. Given the unprecedented nature of this global shock, we are learning in real time. So in my talk, I'll offer arguments for how we can use available governance and political economy research to interpret real-time events as they unfold, and then try to offer ideas for what policymakers can do now and going forward from a governance perspective. Uh, first, um, let's, let's step back a bit and refresh our minds about the thinking on the relationship between governance and success of economic policies in general before the coronavirus. So before 1996, uh, international organizations focused on large infrastructure investments uh that would help economies to take off and uh in that sense, governance was behind the curtain, not talked about. But after the cancer of corruption speech in 1996, a focus on governance began to happen in international development policy largely through capacity building type projects with the. Aim of sort of building, drawing lessons from best practices of government agencies in developed countries and including from countries like Singapore an institution of Singapore style anti-corruption agencies. And this is very much was work in progress, and we are, we are learning over the years about whether this kind of transplanting best practice approaches from other countries works or not. And what I think it would be fair to say that a broad conclusion is that this remains one of the most difficult and least understood problems of our times, how to. Establish wise and restrained public institutions and the way an economist would might interpret the meaning of wise and restrained is a role for the state that is simultaneously strong to protect property rights and establish law and order, but which also is circumscribed, relying on markets for economic prosperity and market-led growth as the most powerful engine to reduce poverty. Yet even in the most laissez-faire economics tradition, there is a need for institutions going beyond protection of property rights and legal institutions, and this is the need for institutions to address market failures. So before coronavirus, we were talking. About the existential threat of climate, so markets have failed to price carbon. There was, there is, there's need for institutions in the very basic textbook economics model for concerns with the ethics of distribution and inequality. And there is again classic textbook economics model. There's a role for institutions to address public goods problem. And the disease control and uh managing disease outbreak is of course the nature of the public good problem we are dealing with today. And part of the reason why addressing these understanding how to get these wise and restrained public institutions has has remained such a challenge is because power and politics is at the heart of the problem, and many international organizations really fear talking about this openly. Uh, we are beginning to get better at this, and so for example, the World Development Report of 2017 on governance laid bare the fact that power and politics is at the center of the problem. Uh, so what is different about the coronavirus times that we live in? Uh, is, uh, so one is there's sweeping public health regulations that have been, uh, adopted by governments. Sorry, I'm just trying to move my, I cannot see my own slides. Um, OK, yes, um, uh, so one is that the governments have adopted sweeping public health regulations. Uh, the other is that governments have been thrust into commanding heights and wartime mode of command and control, and this raises some new questions and concerns from a governance perspective. Will people comply with public health regulations in the popular press, this has been labeled as an issue of trust. Will there be riots on the streets or social chaos? Again, the popular press has been labeling this as arising from distrust. Will governance challenges get worse? Will there be power grabs, you know, the image of a leviathan raising its head? Will there be erosion of markets as forces of growth? Will the left wing governments take control? The politics of fear lead to further erosion of markets or worse human rights violations, and what should international agencies do to manage or forestall these concerns? So let me begin with the first concern that uh uh immediately happened uh as public health regulations began to be adopted, uh which is will people comply with public health regulations? What are we learning from real time events as uh this. As this uh unfolds, um, the example from the United States uh is of confusing signals from political leaders and distrust of experts. And this is in fact consistent with uh established research from before the crisis on how ideological polarization can lead people to resist scientific evidence that runs contrary to their pride. beliefs. Dan Kahan and others at the Yale Center for Cultural Cognition have been examining this in lab experiments with American subjects, and they find they've sort of built a body of evidence on this, on how people are really resistant to science when it runs against their ideological beliefs. And then on the other hand we have the example from India where there were clear signals from political leaders across all political parties of the need for sweeping public health regulations and lockdown in particular, and the reading of the real-time events through the popular press is people by and large in India want to comply with the new rules, but, but too many are simply. Physically unable to, so we have the case of the migrant workers who have no homes or space to socially distance themselves. So I'm now going to switch to focusing on the case of India's migrant workers. This is an image of them leaving the capital Delhi, where they had moved from the poorest states of India, one of them being Bihar, and now they are, after the lockdown, they were forced to move back. And this is what greeted them when they reached home. Their own villages and families locked down the village, refusing entry to the migrants returning home. This Hindi sign here literally says Lockdown in Hindi, and you can see the young people of the village trying to enforce the lockdown. So interpreting this, these two contrasting examples, on the one hand, the richest and most advanced institutional market economy in the world facing real political disagreement and confusion and resistance to the lockdown, and on the other, India. Where these images, despite the the physical constraints to locking down for some people who have no space to socially distance, there is every effort to lock down. So how can we think about interpret this using available research on legitimacy and trust? So the first argument I'm going to make is it's useful to interpret this by distinguishing between legitimacy and trust. While both are about beliefs or expectations about how others are likely to behave and involve the use of informal pressure or social sanctions, there is an important difference that should, that I, the argument is, is going to matter in real time as events unfold. So the, the, the view of legitimacy that I would argue in favor of is comes from a recent paper by Robert Akoloff where he models economic, he models legitimacy in an economic principal agent model and in which legitimacy is defined. As a rule specific attribute. So in this model, a principal with authority is able to finds it easier to enforce an order if the order is regarded as legitimate by the agents on whom the principal is enforcing it. And regarding what it means for agents to regard a rule as legitimate is if they believe that others are following it, so the compliance with the rule is essentially enforced through peer to peer monitoring and the risk of or the costs of incurring social sanctions should anyone deviate from the order. Now this modeling of legitimacy in Akalot's model is actually can be linked to similar arguments that were made separately by Kaushik Basu in his analysis of what explains why some countries have laws on paper that are not effectively implemented. And how do we get compliance with the new law? And Korshek used the idea of focal point in game theory to argue that a new law works and only works if it switches, if it changes the focal point in the game being played out in society, that is, if it changes beliefs about whether others are going to comply. Uh, and, uh, uh, and this perspective can. Can lead us to take to to set out certain hypotheses about legitimacy, which are different from other conceptions of legitimacy, such as in the World Development Report 2011 on conflict in which legitimacy was bundled with government performance and service delivery and acquired by building trust through effective service delivery. So legitimacy and trust were conflated and conflated with service delivery. It's also very different from other views that say legitimacy is about democratic, democratic processes, and only when decisions are democratically taken do they have legitimacy. So let me just quickly go through these novel hypotheses based on a focal point of view which may Apply to real of this unprecedented pandemic going forward. One, legitimacy of post-shock new rules is not necessarily lower in developing countries, despite pre-shock lower trust as measured by high perceptions of corruption, for example. 2 low levels of pre-shock trust in government can coexist with a high level of initial legitimacy because of the nature of a global public bad shock, because of its global scale and immediate life's risk, which can create a focal point. Uh, legitimacy of new rules. I'm going to keep putting this in parenthesis because it should not be confused with legitimacy of institutions, democratic institutions in general, is lower in countries with greater ideological polarization in political institutions. Legitimacy is lower where government bureaucracies are weaker, by which we mean have lower autonomy to pursue a defined technical mandate. And once political polarization and bureaucracy strength are controlled for, there is the hypothesis is that there should be insignificant difference in legitimacy between democratic and authoritarian institutional regimes. Let me just jump in to give you your 5 minute warning, please. Thank you. Oh gosh, OK, um, so the implications of, uh, uh, so essentially what I've described here with a focal point view is a windfall of legitimacy to many countries going forward, which political, which can have two very different types of effects. Political leaders can use this for the politics of divisiveness and fear as Felipe was just describing. People in developing countries, political leaders with left wing characteristics can use it for power grabs, but it is also an opportunity for reform leaders to strengthen public institutions in this wise and restrained ways. And what I was going to talk about in the rest of my talk was How can international organizations exercise a comparative advantage they have of being outside the domestic political game to strengthen the hands of reform leaders, not by picking donor darlings and reform champions, but in apolitical and nonpartisan ways. Let me Let me just quickly try to show you what is the risk, what is the governance challenge facing the policy response that experts are advising, which is increased direct cash transfers, war scale management of supply chains, testing, testing, testing, and increasing public spending on health and delivering it through frontline health workers who can be trusted. This was the key lesson. From the Ebola outbreak, so what do we know about trust now? Trust in this case looks very different from a large literature on generalized trust, which is not that helpful. So we did a survey in Bihar, the state from which it's a very large survey of very different levels of respondents, and let me just quickly share with you some of the examples of distrust coming out of this survey. We asked. People, uh, health workers from the bottom up to the supervisor level, about the extent to which they agree with the following statement, irrespective of my efforts, the system will not allow people's health outcomes to improve. So the top bar is for supervisors who are at the highest level in the healthcare and the bottom, The bar is called CHW's community health workers. These are very humble, low level village level health workers across the cadres. There's the modal. By far the modal response is people agree with the statement that irrespective of their efforts, the system they do not trust will allow people's health outcomes to improve. Another question was, in my work I have to take permission for every little thing, which is a reflection of whether they are trusted to do their work. Again across the corres, a modal number of people agree that they have to take permission for every little thing, including supervisors. Uh, people are describing regular management meetings they have as being about discussing bad performance and involving scoldings. Uh, supervisors show a similar picture. The blue line is whether the supervisors say they discussed bad performance in meetings, and 76% say they always discuss bad performance. Uh, the frontline health workers are not getting their salaries paid on time because these are the least trusted cadre of workers. In the public system in India, so the circle is around again these frontline community health workers who at the time of our survey had not received their salaries for 6 months or more, and these are the providers battling the coronavirus at the front lines who we are supposed to be clapping for. Um So this is completely contrary to the logic of economic theory, which actually suggests that there should be a reduced reliance on scoldings and high-powered incentives and greater role for recruiting intrinsically motivated agents and for reducing top-down hierarchical monitoring and greater role for autonomy and peer to peer professional norms. This economic theory has been. Recently augmented with insights from game theory and what this suggests is there's a very complementary role for communication as in any game theoretic multiple equilibria setting of selecting between equilibria through communication to shift norms and beliefs, and we have a very interesting case of Ciara from several decades ago but which remains. Relevant today and which has not been explored because Ciara took on politics centrally while external partners have focused on social accountability interventions bypassing the state, focusing on NGOs and communities and in fact what all the evidence is showing us and what people in developing countries are showing. is they are more active is as political rather than social principles, and there is a real need to address knowledge gaps about how to treat contestability in local political markets. So the immediate implications are actually quite simple. Hi, we're at 20 minutes, so if you can sort of do your wrap up, please, that'd be great. These are my last slides. Thanks for your patience. So as we provide more resources to countries and people with great needs for basic life goods, let's change the situation from the one that is currently existing in a place like India of not paying wages to frontline health workers and treating them as quasi volunteers, pay steady living wages. Along with messaging and communication, using the game theoretic insights in management meetings to move away from scoldings, to signal trust and encourage peer to peer monitoring and professional norms, use locally relevant media CRR style to broadcast messages about the role of local political leaders in supporting. not hindering the frontline health workers. This is where apolitical international agencies who are not part of the domestic political game have a particular comparative advantage. I refer everyone to the policy research report of the Development Research Group, Chapter 7, Box 7.3, about what this means for agencies. Like the World Bank, which have a political prohibition in our articles of agreement, and failure to address politics now in apolitical ways, and again this report discusses how that can be done. In fact, we will increase the risk of the politics of fear that Felipe talked about and perhaps even power grabs by the Leviathans. Projects and policies can immediately use this detailed context-specific research that we've done in Bihar where we've examined what these local media markets look like. We should not take communication lightly. We need, and finally I'll just end with this, we need more. Political rigor and clarity and fewer euphemisms to understand the potential of contestability in local political markets and internal dialogue is already ongoing. I think we can talk much more clearly and rigorously about it using this moment of windfall legitimacy. Thank you. Wonderful. Thanks very much, Duty. Um, let's go over to Antonio for, uh, uh, for some comments. OK, thank you, Art. Just a second. I'm trying to share my screen with the Everybody, And a Just a second if you. Hey. OK. OK, would you? Do you see my screen? Yes, we can see them, Antonio. If you can just go to slide view, it'll be larger. OK, perfect. That's great. OK, thank you very much. It was a pleasure to comment on these two papers by Stutti and by Philippe and coauthors. I think that both papers are really, really interesting. The challenge I have that these papers, even though very, very interesting, are basically orthogonal at the beginning in the sense that one talks about legitimate and trust in a general radical framework and Gives the case of Bihar. The second talks about the fear, the role of fear in the election in 2014, the congressional election in the US. So apparently these two papers are very different geographically and as a Framework. However, I think there are a deeper thing in common, and I will elaborate on this, and I think the deep thing in common is a crisis as testing time for legacy, for legitimacy. Apologies. This is a very old. Question. So I will use an example from classical literature to illustrate both papers and to see how they are connected, how they are connected, how we can learn from the, from the, from the past. I put here I have a glass so I can check. First, the most interesting example is actually coming from the Greek literature. It's a history of the Pelopollesian War by Thucydides. There Thucydides describes the political economy, the political effect of the war, and the plague in Athens and what happened, and I think the lessons are really very interesting for today's analysis. Just to remind you, in 14,030 BC, an epidemic broke out and devastated Athens. Citizens were very upset with the leader at the time, Pericles, because it was during a difficult war situation. It was a very dramatic situation. So Pericles gave a very important speech which is very emotional, which became famous, I think it's one of the most famous speeches. In history and it's a funeral oration it's called here in the US and he managed to tame the people's resentment and to ride out the storm at the beginning. However, there was some internal uproar, and they managed to kick him out for a while, but afterwards he came back and he was re-elected and he became the strategos again and led. And unfortunately, after a few months he died, but this is another story. So just to be sure that we picture the situation, I put also this picture you see Pericles on the left and he giving the funeral oration on the left, on the right. What are the lessons which are key for today? First, there is a crisis epidemic. Second, there was an emotional final speech which is very important for legitimacy, and I will argue and I will see how this is connected with what Tutti and Felipe were arguing. At the very short term, there is a popular uproar. Finally, he is elected in the midterm. We'll see more terminology. He's elected again to become stratigos and leads with confidence the nation. I summarize the argument in these graphs. You have the crisis on top here. You have some preexisting legitimacy and you have some manipulation. It could be good and could be bad. You could have in the short run some political unrest. You have two outcomes out of it or you ennounce legitimacy, and this is what basically. What basically Stuti was arguing, or you have a regime change, and I will talk about this. If you announce legitimacy in the short term, you announce legitimacy for the next crisis, and this reinforces your power and this is what win for legitimacy, the terminology that Tuti had introduced. So I like this scheme because It allows us to put all the two papers and some research we are doing at the IMF in a context. Let me explain the context. Well, at the top left here, some manipulation. This is the paper by Philippe Coauthors. They are basically trying how political manipulation can affect preexisting legitimacy. Possible unrest. This is in the middle. This is something that we are doing here at the fund, and I will give you some flavor of the research in progress. And third, here what was talking about, which is how legitimate interest is announced possibly by the experience of going through a crisis. I will talk also slightly one minute about the regime changes. So this scheme allows us to analyze, to put all the two papers, the 3 papers in context and to see how they are connected and to have a mini theory of social crisis and political consequences. First, let me talk with the left top corner manipulation. As Felipe was saying econometrically, this could be a very important role. I go back and I take a little tour in pragmatic and linguistics which have studied how the manipulation of language can really affect our beliefs. And here the the reference is Herbert Greis and his theory of implication. His theory is that basically Herbert Greis was a philosopher. He wrote about 50 years ago, I think, and his theory was that when we do speak, we do imply a lot of things, and sometimes what we do imply is much more important of what we say implicitly. So when we say I slept on a boat yesterday. The implication is that this was not my boat. I don't say this, but everybody believes this. When I say Antonio is Italian, but he's nice, the implication, even though I don't say, is that the Italians are not nice. This soup is not good only for your skin, but also something else. The implication that you derive is that you focus on the good for your skin and you take for granted. There are a lot of, there are a lot of neuropsychological basis for this theory right now. Basically we use the information given as implied, we take for granted and we are less prone to question it. So this is a technique which is widely used by the advertisement industry and by the political messaging. So Felipe gave a very good example, and when Senator Rand Paul said that a wide open policy is not only a danger for national security purposes but also this means that we tend to process the information. Danger for national security as a given, so not to question it. There are plenty of studies, and I think that a possible extension of the paper is to look how implication is used in the messaging of these various things, and this is something that ad industry uses quite a lot. Antonio, I'll just give you 3 or 4 minutes to wrap up. Thank you. I wrap up. Well, I take issue for one statement by Stuti and Vada. Do epidemics cause civil unrest? This is part of the popular wisdom. It's common. It seems logical, but the economic, how to say, the The evidence is not clear based. We have done some colleagues of mine are doing some study using a novel database on reported social unrest index measuring social unrest as reported by a news outlet and correlate this with the database on unrest, and they couldn't find a good a good result. Now, as always in negative studies we have Look more carefully because, but we couldn't find, no, they couldn't find much much much effect of social unrest on civil unrest, at least immediate. We do have some anecdotes for Ebola in Liberia in 2014, but it's not a given that there is this strong correlation, even despite the Popular wisdom, so to speak. There is also another issue, how do we disentangle epidemics from correlated factors, quality of public service or other things. And this brings me to the last point. Even though Epidemics may not have a big effect in the very short term in terms of civil unrest. They have a deeper political implication if they are able to show how inefficient and corrupt is the government. Yes, there are two examples. One is 86 tragedy in Chernobyl, which was considered a key factor in showing how inefficient and bad was the Soviet system in dealing with a major emergency. The second was the Mexico City earthquake in '85, which showed how the corruption of the PRI party had led to many. Preparation, so to speak, and violation, widespread violation of the of the of the code. So just to sum up what we have learned, legitimacy is key during crisis, especially in this crisis where you do not have enough people. You cannot enforce your orders. You have to rely by force. You have to rely on people good sentiment and people's sense of responsibility, and this is only if you have a legitimate example. Trust and legitimacy can be boosted during crisis. The funeral oration by. But there is also in negative you have the example by Felipe where the the shock cause cause this. Third, there is no evidence, at least as far as we know, that there is epidemic cause immediate arrest as Tucidides was claiming and as Tutti also was mentioning, but there is good evidence that How bad and good a crisis manager has long term deeper political implications. These are much more difficult to measure econometrically. There is a positive cycle which is called legitimate windfall. That is the positive side that Tuti focused on. There is also a negative possible cycle which is delegitimization of the current regimes, and I gave just two examples, but you could find also other examples. I'm done. Thank you. Thank you very much, Antonio. Um, and I'll just ask you to unshare your screen so that we can subsequently see other speakers when they come on. Uh, thank you. Um, and thank you very much, uh, uh, Stutti and, uh, Felipe for, uh, for the excellent presentations. We can now, um, go over to, uh, uh, to our online audience for, um, comments and questions for the speakers. What I'd like to do is actually just take a big batch of, uh, questions and reactions all at once, and then we'll just go back once to, uh, uh, to the three speakers to react to them. I think that'll be a little more, uh, time efficient. Um, uh, so if you're on Webex, um, please use the raise your hand, uh, feature, and, uh, somehow magically, I will see who has raised their hands and I'll try to get to you. Um, while, uh, you're, uh, waiting to formulate your questions and find the raise your hand button, which is up beside your name in the top right of the screen. Um, let me, uh, just sort of ask one question that I, I wanted to ask already from the middle of Felipe's presentation, and I think it's a little bit in, uh, uh, in what Antonio was talking about as well. And, and that is, um, you know, at the end of Felipe's presentation, you basically ask sort of what are the other associations, what are the other effects? And I think that there is Sort of, you know, this what some people have now referred to in the presentation as a rally around the flag effect or a solidarity effect. I think the rally around the flag effect has a more jingoistic interpretation, but simply, you know, we're all in this together solidarity effect. They could actually have very, very positive effects on on on politics and outcomes. And the other thing that I'd really like to hear from both Tutti and and Felipe on is, and particularly from Felipe, given that this shock is so different, is, you know, what we know about how governments are going to be judged by their competence of the response, and I think there is this very important possible cycle of sort of delegitimacy in contrast to the legitimate legitimacy windfall that Stuy talked about. So let me, um, uh, let me read out a couple of questions that we've gotten from our, uh, uh, from YouTube, um, audience. Um, apologies cause I'm gonna have to try to sort of paraphrase them as I read them here. Uh, so there's a kind of a battery of questions from Sharif Salah. Um, uh, so the first question for Felipe is, what do we know about these rally around the flag effects and does it provide benefits to incumbents? Uh, Sharif also has a question for Stuti. Um, On your point that legitimacy of new rules being weaker with weaker bureaucracy, does that mean that the centralized states will um face uh uh far less trust in centralized states? Um, And also um a general question from Sharif. Um, considering that a global recession is likely, at least in the short term, how would this cancel out any long-term legitimacy gains, um, that governments might get from their handling of the pandemic. So, basically, they'll be uh rewarded for handling the pandemic well, but perhaps penalized by the economic shock. Um, so that's, uh, from the YouTube audience just now. Uh, I'll turn over to Challar. I see that you've raised your hand. Go ahead, Chaler. Tell her you're unmuted now. Duller. Can you hear us? You cannot hear me. I think I can hear you. Thank you. OK. All right, so my question was along the same lines about decentralization. I mean, one thing that's common with India and the US is the decentralized figure, and the response to the epidemic actually happens a lot of it at the more local level, at the governor's level, versus In the case of China, where they can immediately mobilize 40,000 doctors and nurses and send them to Wuhan, so how does that structure play in terms of chaos and how does it help or hurt the local versus the federal politicians? Does or does does that not matter at all that the federal politician reaps the benefit and pays the price? Thank you, Chala. Um, uh, Ala, why don't you just go ahead and acknowledge anybody else with their hands up. Um, nobody, uh, so far. I'll let you know. OK, well, if you prefer to do this the way we do it in real life seminars and just butt in with a question, the floor is open. Please just remember to unmute yourself and jump in. Uh, just a question or comment. I mean, people were writing in the chats, so I actually thought that you would take comments and questions from the chat. 11 thing I talked about during the first presentation is that the key difference with coronavirus disease relative to Ebola is that it was not first introduced in the US by a foreigner but by a returning US citizen. And I'm thinking that that might have uh Create some differences in terms of using the immigration angle, even in the fact that when the borders were closed from Wuhan in America, the these restrictions exempted Americans who were returning from abroad. And the whole idea that you know if we are to accept globalization then this whole the then travel and tourism is, is, you know, an essential an essential part of this so you know it, it would be interesting to see how we deal with this after COVID-19. Thank you. Thanks very much. Um, uh, this is Jehan, right? I saw you on the chat before. Yes, yes, thanks. Um, anybody else want to jump in? Just, uh, introduce yourself as well before you speak, please. OK, well, if we don't have further questions right now, um, I'll just ask Ale to mute everybody again on that because there's some typing in the background. Thank you, Ale. It's great to have that power. Um, and, um, uh, what I'll do is go, um, uh, maybe just in reverse order to the speakers. So I'll give Antonio a chance to, uh, reflect on, uh, some of the discussion, and then we'll go to Study and we'll reserve the final word for, uh, for Felipe. Uh, so over to you, Antonio. Thank you very much. First, to respond to the issues which were raised, let's not forget that this pandemic happened in a particular moment in the political economy history. It's when populist sentiment was rising all over the world. Populist means that you don't trust or you criticize the People in power, you don't believe in the power of the the experts, and you don't believe in the power of coordination and this makes the politics of pandemics much more difficult because the authorities that should be overseeing the response, the expert and the international and national coordination are not there, are under attack already before the crisis. The second, and this comes to answer the issue about decentralization. We see something very interesting happening in many decentralized states or relatively decentralized. There is a reluctance by the central or the local authorities to take a position in the difficult tradeoff. There is a very difficult tradeoff between. Health and economics and both are very costly and both, but if you are successful in stopping the epidemics, people will attack you because the economy will suffer a lot. If you are not successful, they will attack you anyway, so it's such a difficult trade off. What we do observe is that politicians basically give up the ability. The role of choosing. Look at President Trump here, but also in other countries. I'm familiar with Italy, for instance. Basically central authorities are a little bit reluctant to take the toughest decision while the regional authorities, local subnational authorities are taking this. It's almost as despite all the rhetoric, the central authority is very afraid to step up and to take a leadership role, and I think that this may have in the longer term, in the short term it's OK, save them from criticism. In the longer term may have some consequence on legitimacy. Thank you. Thanks very much, Antonio. Over to you, Stuti. Thank you. Uh, first, uh, thanks very much, Antonio, for your very useful comments and uh the fact that you had to deal with not 2 but 3 papers. You received 2 from me. Um, and thank you for, uh, to everyone for the comments and questions. Uh, to address the main comment Antonio had, uh, was taking issue with whether pandemics, uh, increase, uh, civil unrest. Happy to concede the point that perhaps pandemics don't have in a statistical sense, a significant increase, lead to a significant increase in social unrest, but I think from a policy perspective, that issue is not perhaps that interesting or helpful because. Because we were already living in a world with increasing civil unrest, with growing protests on the, on the streets across countries. And so the question is how does, how do we think about the changed political setting to respond to these, to, to this unrest. On the second point that Art asked about the solidarity effect. Uh, yes, uh, indeed, that is the argument I was making that part of one type of association with this pandemic. So to answer also Felipe's last point about are there other associations, a very intuitive and obvious other association, which is in the phrase we are all in this together, is that health is contained. This is a contagious health problem. So when a fly flies don't know the difference between identities, viruses don't distinguish between people of different religions or ideological identity. So this moment of strengthening public health systems as a classic public good or with negative externalities could in fact be a moment to develop those wise and restrained public institutions on. Decentralization. I think my response generally is I don't think it's a trade off with strong bureaucracies. You can have strong bureaucracies within decentralized governments, and in fact what we are seeing and what we documented in the policy research report on politics is that local political contestation has grown around the world and across sort of countries with Very different types of national political regimes and these forces of local political contestability which we've documented in the report in this recent paper on Bihar in fact suggest ways in which communication can be taken more seriously, perhaps highlight this solidarity rule of we're all in it together to combat a public health crisis, and that is the argument that was being made. Thank you. Thank you, Stie. Um, back to you, Felipe. Uh, thanks a lot. Uh, a lot of great thoughts here. Uh, thank you, uh, first to Antonio. I think he, uh, you know, the best discussions are those that, that, that really draw these connections that like, uh, uh, were not obvious to begin with. So I think that was a, that was a great discussion. And just to respond to, to some of the points that, uh, uh, uh, Antonio made, just, you know, some thoughts that, that occurred to me. Uh, you know, the issue about the, the messaging and, and licature, I think it's, it's, it's great and actually like the, what, what I see as the next step in, in this particular agenda for us is to sort of investigate the role of the media as well and, and kind of transmitting the message. I mean, we point out how, you know, the media made a big deal out of this, uh, uh, you know, just before the election, and then it basically kind of collapses, uh, right upon the election in terms of the media exposure around it. So I think that's, that's, that's one of the key things that, that we want to understand. And when you, when you think about uh uh uh uh you know results in, in, in terms of the manipulation that, that Antonio, uh, uh, uh mentioned, I think one of the key, uh, uh, insights that I would draw here is that it also shows sort of the limits of manipulation in the sense that like not all of the, the, the strategies like really worked, right? So, so they're really heavy on the Obama angle and it didn't seem to have worked. Uh, uh, uh, so much, which I think gets back to the point of sort of the other associations that I kind of left hanging at the end, and, and Suti kind of came, uh, uh, uh, uh, just right now, I think, uh, uh, very much with this, uh, and art as well, and, and, and when he was, uh, talking about sort of this angle of solidarity and of health, right? And sort of healthcare as one possible association and the anxiety surrounding healthcare, particularly, I think, in the US but in other places as well. I think these are, uh, the, the, the kinds of associations I think we may see. Uh, uh, resonating as well. So I think that's uh, uh, um. That's, that's, that's really important. Uh, I, I, I think in terms of the, the, the question about sort of the, the policy judgment and what we know about like what, uh, you know, how voters might, uh, uh, approach this, uh, I think one thing that, uh, uh, uh, um, is, is clear from the evidence, so there's this, uh, paper by Neil Malhotra, uh, and I forget the, the, the, the co-authors, but about how Uh, voters don't seem to reward like preparedness for disaster, right? So whether you have prepared well for the disaster or not doesn't seem to be rewarded. So I think that's something that is important. So the fact that like, uh, uh, uh, you know, we were exposed to Because people have a hard time making the counterfactuals, right? What would have happened is something that people have a hard time, uh, making out, which I think gets to the point about the, the, the health versus economy trade-off, which I would frame slightly different, differently from what Antonio did. I don't think there is right now that much of a trade-off in the sense that what's really uh uh uh um dragging the economy down is, is, is not so much the, the, the, the measures, the lockdown measures. But the virus, right? And, and the fear of the virus. So, you know, one thing that I, that I was reading that I think illustrates this is, is domestic travel is still quote unquote open, but it's down like 97% because people are not are choosing not to fly, right? People are choosing not to go to restaurants. It's way down before the lockdowns came into place. But I think the, the, the, the, the trade-off is, is before the crisis becomes evident, and that's where the, the, the, the government failed. and, and, and it's, it's kind of easy to understand the political economy of it, right? So, if you had intervened and locked things down before the crisis emerged, that would have uh had a much stronger impact because it would have contained the crisis earlier. But you can't really do that because the backlash will be tremous, right? People are like, are you doing all of this because, like, you know, a handful of cases. So that's where the failure is, and, and I think Antonio is like very right, and, and so that's where the trade-off is really, really strong, right? At that point, and that's what happened in Italy and, and, and that's kind of a failure of governance. I think it's very hard to Uh, uh, uh, uh, to, uh, you know, address. Uh, another point about like the, the, the rally around the flag and, and sort of what we know about that. I think we know that, that it exists, you know, in the US, uh, I, I think it's quite clear it was in response to wars and, and, uh, external crisis, and, and, but I think it's very short-lived, right? I think people forget that like Jimmy Carter had this major boost in his approval ratings when the Iran hostage crisis happened in 1979, because, you know, like, There's this crisis of foreign enemy right around, but that, that is quite short-lived, right? So I think that's, that's one thing that we know about that, that I think is, that I think is important. And uh just one final point about the, the, the, the issue of sort of the difference between uh uh Ebola and COVID in terms that now, uh, it's not so much being brought by immigrants, but, you know, it was returning US citizens and so on and so forth. I think that's true. And that's why what explains that the association being drawn now is not so much about Immigrants, but about China, right? And, and so it's still kind of like this outside uh uh uh um agent. But it has to be different so that it resonates, right? Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, so, I think that actually illustrates the point that you have to do it in a way that, that quote unquote makes sense, uh, uh, uh, for voters, right? Or, or for, for the audience, and I think this illustrates the point. So you can't say like, well, you know, you have to close the border with Mexico, even though like there has been Uh, some talk about that, but it has, you know, that's, that's not really what this crisis is about, right? It's like if, if fear is being triggered by shark attacks, right, you're not going to blame that on, on, on, on foreigners, or, or it's not that obvious, right? So it really underscores the point that the message needs to find associations that resonate, but I'm, I'm just gonna stop here because I've, I, I guess I've talked too much already, but yeah, very like great food for thought, uh, uh, in all of this. Well, thank you very much, Felipe. No, not talking too much at all. I very much appreciate, uh, from all three of you, Felipe, Antonio, and Stui for, uh, for your presentations and discussion. And, you know, a little, uh, the odd classical reference is something that you don't normally expect from our friends across the street at the IMF. So Antonio, very glad to see you being, uh, uh, not typecast. Um, so, uh, again, a big thank you to everyone. I think my one reflection on this is that just when we're, uh, You know, when you start looking at the epidemiology of COVID, you rapidly realize that whatever you knew yesterday probably doesn't apply today because things are changing so quickly. And, you know, the same is true for the economic, uh, uh, shock and policy response. And, and I'm thinking now even more so with the, um, you know, what kind of political dynamics this will unleash and how it's going to matter for the future is probably in the same, uh, in the same vein, that every day we're going to be learning something new. So it's wonderful to get the uh up to-date insights from all of you. Thank you very much, and I'll just put in a plug that this is an ongoing series of e-seminars and uh we have more coming up next week and the week after. They're all listed in the, uh, in the invitations that you get. So hope to see you at the next and subsequent ones. Thank you very much and uh stay safe. Thank you. Thank you.

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The Politics of Pandemics eSeminar

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The Politics of Pandemics eSeminar

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Governments across the world are struggling to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. In this e-seminar on April 16, 2020, Filipe Campante (Johns Hopkins/SAIS) and Stuti Khemani (World Bank) presented research on the role of pandemics in electoral politics and the relationship between governance and the success of policies to manage COVID-19. Timestamps: 3:07 - Filipe Campante; 26:48 - Stuti Khemani; 48:30 - Antonio Spilimbergo; 122:20 - Q&A

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The Politics of Pandemics

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