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Reviews of "The Impacts of Corona Populism"

Reviewers: Golnaz Baradaran Motie (Western Kentucky University) | 📒📒📒◻️◻️ • 📒📒📒◻️◻️

Published onMar 07, 2021
Reviews of "The Impacts of Corona Populism"

To read the original manuscript, click the link above.

Summary of Reviews: This preprint explores important issues regarding right-wing political movements and their impacts on COVID-19 cases, however, both reviewers raise concerns about the theoretical and analytic approaches used.

Reviewer 1 (Golnaz Baradaran Motie) | 📒📒📒◻️◻️

Reviewer 2 | 📒📒📒 ◻️◻️

RR:C19 Strength of Evidence Scale Key

📕 ◻️◻️◻️◻️ = Misleading

📙📙 ◻️◻️◻️ = Not Informative

📒📒📒 ◻️◻️ = Potentially Informative

📗📗📗📗◻️ = Reliable

📘📘📘📘📘 = Strong

To read the reviews, click the links below.

Comments
1
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Patrick Mellacher:

I thank Golnaz Baradaran Motie and the anonymous reviewer for for making some very good and helpful points. In fact I addressed some crucial ones in the latest revision of my manuscript (16th of February).

Most importantly, I now use three types of panel regressions (OLS, FE, SYS-GMM) to identify (in my point of view) much more convincingly the effect of the FPÖ-policy switch, including with the help of district-level fixed effects, as suggested by reviewer 2.

I also introduced a number of robustness checks that address other possible explanations brought forward by the reviewers (political & epidemiological) and refer to more important work on corona populism by others such as the paper by Eberl et al. I agree that there are differing concepts of populism. I tried to make it clear in a footnote that I do not claim that the definition I used (derived from Daron Acemoglu, one of the most important and famous contemporary economists) was the only possible or correct one.

Followingly, I agree that there is much more to say about corona populism both on a theoretical and on an empirical level. Many excellent points are made in other papers that I cite in my revised version. My claim to advance theory rather refers to studying the impact of corona populism (or scepticism) within a theoretical model that - although it is very simple - supports the main empirical conclusions qualitatively, i.e. the model is able to reproduce empirical stylized facts.

My paper is currently under review at a journal. But I will, in a subsequent revision, happily address those points made by these RRs which I did not address so far in my current revision. I hope the practice of making rapid reviews publicly available will survive the crisis as I believe it to be most helpful.

(I also posted this on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Patrick_M_Econ/status/1370302495419928576)