Should the world turn to dictatorship to beat back the pandemic and the many other challenges we face? Even if dictatorships were better than democracies at fighting the pandemic, that wouldn’t be reason enough to replace presidents with politburos and parliaments with juntas. Freedom, equal representation, and civil rights are more important than ruthlessly enforced public-health measures. Nevertheless, the bold, resolute governance that autocracy supposedly offers may be tempting. The glamour of that dark path conflicts with the fact that, despite the negative publicity they have faced, democracies are at least as effective at vaccinating their citizens as non-democracies. Our World in Data, a collaboration between researchers at Oxford University and the Global Change Data Lab, provides up-to-date information on the proportion of each country’s citizens who have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, as well as on their GDP per capita. Experts from the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg classify regimes on the basis of their adherence to free elections and protection of individual rights, making it possible to compare the performance of democratic regimes with that of autocratic ones. At the same level of economic prosperity, democracies are on average comparable to or slightly better than their autocratic counterparts in terms of how much of their population has been vaccinated. Some democracies have underperformed their peers, but others have overperformed. The same is true for dictatorships.

In fact, though it may be surprising to many, democracies have proved that they have the edge in many aspects of this crisis, including the initial containment of spread and compliance with measures designed to limit transmission. They are also better at preventing deaths from COVID-19. Democracies have reported more fatalities from the disease than have autocracies, but these reports are complicated by autocracies’ tendency to fudge their data to make things look better. One way of getting around that problem is to estimate how many more people died in 2020 (when the pandemic broke out) compared with previous years. This is precisely what Ariel Karlinsky and Dmitry Kobak did. Although excess mortality is an imperfect measure of COVID deaths and available for fewer countries than the fatality data are (Russia is included but China is not), it is a harder number to falsify. Karlinsky and Kobak’s data can be used to compare democracies with dictatorships in their percentage of excess deaths during the pandemic. And at every level of GDP per capita, democracies do at least as well as, and sometimes better than, dictatorships.