ArticleSSM - population health2022
Does 'Data fudging' explain the autocratic advantage? Evidence from the gap between Official Covid-19 mortality and excess mortality.
Article in SSM - population health, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- No Place to Hide? Regional Resilience and Vulnerability to Global Catastrophic Risk.Global challenges (Hoboken, NJ) · 2026Review
- Legislative incapacity and underreporting of COVID-19 mortality.Preventive medicine reports · 2024Article
- "Won't get fooled again": statistical fault detection in COVID-19 Latin American data.Globalization and health · 2022Article
- Good democratic governance can combat COVID-19 - excess mortality analysis.International journal of disaster risk reduction : IJDRR · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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 other factors that explain official Covid-19 mortality, excess mortality and the difference between the two, our results suggest that any apparent 'autocratic advantage' in fighting the pandemic is likely to only exist in official Covid-19 mortality. Analyzing the gap between excess mortality and official Covid-19 mortality we find that autocracies on average have a larger gap between official Covid-19 mortality data and excess mortality data, which points towards 'autocratic data fudging' of their official Covid-19 mortality statistics.
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Registered trials
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