Other governments have taken advantage of the crisis to take actions that otherwise would have been strongly resisted. With India under lockdown, the Hindu-nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced laws that would make it easier for Indians to become permanent residents in the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir region.

A look around the world shows many other governments that have overreached in response to the outbreak. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte, a ruthless strongman in normal times, seized even greater powers to fight the virus, including the threat of imprisonment for spreading fake news about the coronavirus — a measure that presumably could be used to criminalize criticism of the government. Turkmenistan, arguably the most repressive country in Central Asia, imposed what may be the most draconian approach to information control, arresting people for even discussing the outbreak in public. In Thailand, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who took power in a military coup in 2014, announced he was assuming emergency powers, including the right “to censor or shut down media if necessary.”

Whatever advantages autocracy might offer for shaping a response to the pandemic, it becomes truly dangerous when the strongman chooses to deny the threat or to give some alternative narrative. The all-powerful president of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, has allowed the country’s Premier League soccer season to proceed as scheduled, arguing — in an echo of President Trump’s comment that “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself” — that “the panic can hurt us more than the virus itself.” Instead of staying home, as virtually every other government is urging people to do, Mr. Lukashenko recommends that Belarussians imbibe vodka daily, make regular visits to the sauna and do some hard farm work.

In neighboring Russia, where President Putin has ramped up defenses against the outbreak, we can see another problem posed by autocratic regimes: dubious statistics. As of Thursday, Russia had more than 3,500 infections, but for weeks the authorities reported curiously low numbers. The real number may well be far higher. True to form, Russia has also joined China and Iran in spreading disinformation about the origins of the coronavirus on social media — including the theory coming out of Beijing that it’s an American disease that might have been introduced by American military visitors.

In the end, it is hard to draw up a conclusive balance sheet on the relative disease-fighting abilities of autocracies and democracies: The pandemic is far from finished, and there are many factors other than governing style. A country’s wealth and resources obviously play a major role in its ability to respond to an unexpected crisis, and countries with a history of previous epidemics have a clear advantage in coping with new ones.

Yet democracies do appear to hold a clear advantage. That may not seem obvious when China can throw up a new hospital in less than two weeks while New York City is fast running out of hospital beds. But the flow of information and public give-and-take in the United States could serve to constantly fine-tune tactics against the disease; false information, deliberate or not, can be quickly exposed. Transparency, an official in Taiwan noted, was one of the most important factors in the success of the government’s response.

An analysis by The Economist of data from all epidemics since 1960 found that “for any given level of income, democracies appear to experience lower mortality rates for epidemic diseases than their non-democratic counterparts.” One reason, the magazine said, was that authoritarian regimes are “poorly suited to matters that require the free flow of information and open dialogue between citizen and rulers.” It is unlikely that Mr. Lukashenko could sustain his foolhardy stance if Belarus had an independent news media.

Where the Trump administration fits into this debate depends, as does so much in the American political landscape, on which side of the bitter political divide one stands on. The diversity of American democracy — the local governments, varied health services, strong news media and multiple religious institutions — preclude a China-like rule by authoritarian diktat. But the inclination of the autocratically inclined to exploit a crisis should never be dismissed.

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