Where the virus spreads the most: countries with illiberal populist leaders

The four major countries where coronavirus cases have recently increased the fastest are Brazil, the United States, Russia and Great Britain. And they have something in common.

They are all led by populist male leaders who present themselves as anti-elite and anti-establishment.

The four leaders Jair Bolsonaro, Donald J. Trump, Vladimir V. Putin and Boris Johnson also have a lot of differences, of course, just like their countries. Yet all four subscribe to versions of what Harvard government professor Daniel Ziblatt and co-author of the book How Democracies Die calls radical right-wing non-liberal populism.

This model is no coincidence, many political scientists think. Illiberal populists tend to reject the opinions of scientists and promote conspiracy theories.

Very often, they denounce intellectuals and experts of almost all types, said Steven Levitsky, co-author of Mr. Ziblatts. Leaders, he said, claim to have a kind of common sense wisdom that experts lack. It doesn’t work very well against Covid-19.

In Brazil, Mr. Bolsonaro fired his Minister of Health and repeatedly asked states to end home care orders. In the United States, Mr. Trump rejected the opinions of experts for almost two months, predicting that the virus would disappear like a miracle. In Great Britain, the government of Mr. Johnsons initially encouraged people to continue socializing, even as other countries closed.

The four leaders also flouted advice on personal protection measures from the start, by refusing to wear a mask or by continuing to shake hands.

The trend is also evident beyond these countries. Iran, a country with a supreme theocratic leader, is fifth in growth in the past two weeks among countries with at least 50 million inhabitants. Health experts say the government has heeded the warnings about reopening too quickly. Mexico where President Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador is a left-wing populist whose government has published posters saying the virus no es grave (is not serious) is sixth.

An academic effort to track countries’ responses to the virus has shown that a delay in government response allows the virus to spread much faster, said Thomas Hale of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, who is leading the effort. Many countries experiencing serious outbreaks now share belated recognition of the urgency of the crisis, said Hale.

Often the leaders who responded more slowly spoke of the need to prioritize economic growth. But trade-offs between the economy and public health may not exist, say scientists and economists: The quickest route to economic normalcy is to control the spread of the virus.

There is this false tension between public health and economic health, said Wafaa El-Sadr, an epidemiologist at Columbia University.

The flip side of the illiberal populists is that countries led by women seem are more successful in the fight against the virus, as some observers have already noted. Germany, New Zealand and Taiwan are all examples.

The link between populist leaders and bad epidemics is not perfect. Viktor Orban in Hungary and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines are also non-liberal populists who reacted quickly. The number of cases seems relatively low in the two countries. Both Orban and Duterte used the crisis as a pretext to further crack down on political opponents.

But global models generally include exceptions. There is actually a pattern, said Levitsky. Populists don’t like experts or rely on experts, and an anti-expert response to the new coronavirus is deadly.

Some populist leaders, such as Mr. Johnson and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, have recently started to take the virus more seriously. In the United States, Mr. Trumps’ response has varied almost every day and has also been diluted by the federalist system, in which governors make many decisions.

Yet Hale suspects that populist countries may continue to fight more than others.

He was watching the initial wave now, he said, but it’s going to be a long journey, and my strong hunch is that countries with really robust governance systems will be the ones who will do the best in the end.