We present six new indices that measure the intensity of government responses to COVID-19 within distinct policy domains: social distancing, schools, businesses, health monitoring, health resources and mask wearing. We create these measures by combining two of the most comprehensive COVID-19 datasets, the CoronaNet COVID-19 Government Response Event Dataset and the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, using a Bayesian time-varying measurement model. Our daily indices track policymakers’ policy intensity to each of these policy domains from 1 January, 2020 to 14 January, 2021, for over 180 countries. In creating these measures, we are able to provide aggregate summaries of policy-making activities which captures the intensity of a country’s government response to COVID-19 in a given policy domain. Using these measures, we are able to clarify findings on the role of lockdowns in preventing infections in the early pandemic period. In terms of policy adoption, we show that more democratic countries and countries with greater levels of economic interdependence tend to have less intense policy responses to the pandemic.

Data and code

The project is reproducible with R code and data available at GitHub.

Citation

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@article{kubinec2025covid,
  title={Cross-National Measures of the Intensity of COVID-19 Public Health Policies},
  author={Kubinec, Robert and Barcel{\'o}, Joan and Goldszmidt, Rafael and Gruji{\'c}, Vanja and Model, Timothy and Schenk, Caress and Cheng, Cindy and Hale, Thomas and Messerschmidt, Luca and Petherick, Anna},
  journal={Journal of Politics},
  year={2025},
  note={Available at: \url{https://doi.org/10.1086/734241}}
}