Notes: The figure shows the average real policy response of governments in our sample (light blue circles) as well as the quadratic fitted response aggregated by populist (green) and non-populist governments (grey) with 95% confidence intervals. The real policy response is calculated by subtracting the normalized Pandemic Backsliding index of the V-Dem Pandemic Backsliding Project (Kolvani et al., 2020) from the Containment and Health index of the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (Hale et al., 2021).