Does ‘Data Fudging’ Explain the Autocratic Advantage? Evidence from the Gap between Official COVID-19 Mortality and Excess Mortality

Governments can underreport Covid-19 mortality to make their performance appear more successful than it is. Autocracies are more likely to ‘fudge’ these data since many autocratic regimes restrict media freedom and thus can prevent domestic media from reporting evidence of undercounting deaths. Autocracies also enjoy greater leverage over reporting health authorities to either fudge data or adopt restrictive definitions of what constitutes Covid-19 mortality. Controlling for factors that partly explain the difference between excess mortality and official Covid-19 mortality, we demonstrate that any apparent ‘autocratic advantage’ in fighting the pandemic is in fact down to ‘autocratic data fudging’. No full liberal democracy is detected as fudging their data, whereas several autocracies and semi-democracies appear to systematically underreport Covid-19 mortality