Professor Konstantin Sonin

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world worked to create public health protocols to protect people from the spread of the virus. As agencies attempted to implement these protocols, however, debates arose over the extent to which individuals would sacrifice personal comfort for the health and safety of their neighbors.

Many anticipated that an authoritarian government such as Russia under Vladimir Putin might have greater success at managing the spread of the disease than its more democratic counterparts, given its ability to control the behavior of its citizens. But did this turn out to be the case?  How did an authoritarian regime react when faced with a public health crisis? Would a powerful authoritarian state have greater effectiveness in coercing the public to comply with protective procedures?

New research co-authored by Konstantin Sonin, John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at Harris, alongside Natalia Lamberova, an assistant professor at UT Dallas, released as a working paper with the Becker Friedman Institute, suggests that this is not the case.

“Authoritarian regimes, which might seem to be well-equipped to implement restrictive measures, are actually ill-suited to deal with public health challenges,” the paper finds.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, instead of focusing on enforcing practices to promote public health, authoritarian leaders used the opportunity to expand the scope of their oppression. Professor Sonin, a Russian citizen and a strong critic of Putin’s autocratic regime, specifically looks at how the Kremlin exploited the pandemic in an effort to maintain power.

The researchers identified and explored two distinct instruments of authoritarian state control: information manipulation and repression. The first took the form of concealing the actual number of COVID-related deaths. The second relied on political prosecution and subduing of state skeptics.

United Russia is the political party of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Because the authority of drafting a response to COVID-19 was decentralized and passed on to individual regions, the appearance of these two tools and their effectiveness differed throughout Russia. The frequency and impact varied depending on that region’s strength of allegiance to United Russia (the party of Putin), the quality of its civil society, and the condition of its institutions.

To measure the scale of information manipulation, Sonin and Lamberova looked at the under-reported deaths from COVID-19 compared to excess mortality of a region. Notably, they found that those regions with a strong United Russia majority produced more information manipulation regarding COVID-19 deaths.

In fact, Sonin notes that the number of reported deaths attributed to COVID drops the closer a region is to a parliamentary election and when the United Russia majority is stronger.

This propaganda has significant repercussions for the health of the Russian people in these regions.

“The government’s use of information manipulation and repression during the pandemic was not innocuous,” Professor Sonin said. “Information manipulation negatively affects citizens’ self-reported compliance with public health guidance, and their willingness to get vaccinated or to recommend the vaccine to vulnerable friends and family.”

The United Russia majority also correlates with a higher quantity of prosecutions. The state enacted articles in Russian Administrative and Criminal Codes to hold citizens liable for the spread of disease. While this appears to be a strong effort of the state to control the pandemic, the authors found they were specifically and heavily enforced on anti-Putin protesters.

Sonin and Lamberova cite findings that attribute the majority of cases initiated under one of these articles to political prosecutions. Therefore, prosecution provides a useful metric of repressions for the purpose of the paper.

The authors also propose in this paper that authoritarian regimes do not substitute repression for information manipulation or vice versa, as other researchers have suggested. Instead, the state uses both to complement one another. With those who are outspoken against the regime repressed through arrest and prosecution, the propaganda was better able to reach and influence the masses.

Under the cover of a pandemic response, the Russian authoritarian regime used these tools to strengthen their position. Those regions with weaker political institutions were especially susceptible to the information manipulation and repression. COVID-19, Sonin and Lamerova write, exacerbated the deterioration of democracy.

But their study did not conclude there. They note that while a greater presence of United Russia led to more prosecution and propaganda, areas of higher quality institutions experienced less manipulation. They also found that regions with a stronger civil society lowered the number of prosecutions. These could be tools that effectively combat the spread of an authoritarian regime’s control.

“This research suggests that authoritarian governments, despite their ability to influence the daily lives of its citizens, fail to protect them from public health crises – not because they cannot, but because they have other interests than the welfare of its citizenry,” said Sonin. “Autocrats exploit crises to better themselves; they do not appear to use their power to help the people.”