Stay at Home! A Comparative Analysis of the Implementation of Lockdowns as a Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

The year 2020 was marked by the implementation of lockdowns at the global scale to contain the COVID-19 pandemic by drastically minimizing human contacts. This public health measure was instantly described as “medieval” by several political actors but, facing the surge of the pandemic, most governments—with a few exceptions such as Sweden—opted for this choice. Social sciences literature has already begun to analyse the feelings and emotions of citizens towards lockdowns, the impact of health measures on trust in governments, the responses of so-called “populist” parties to this restriction of freedom of movement or the political aspect of lockdowns that were presented as health measures during the first wave of COVID-19. However, few studies have examined the different realities that lockdown measures recovered depending on the country in which they were implemented and the evolutions of these measures over time. This chapter aims to fill this gap and has a double objective. On the one hand, it aims to highlight these differences, and on the other hand to highlight the explanatory factors at the origins of these differences. The comparative analysis will be based on a database covering 32 countries to distinguish between strict and more flexible lockdowns by means of different variables such as the order to “stay home”, the number of kilometres of travel allowed outside home, or the presence or self-filled forms for leaving home. The study period is from March 2020 to July 2021 and spans across three different waves of COVID-19. A double synchronic and diachronic analysis will be performed to categorize the countries according to the strictness of the lockdowns for each wave but also in an evolutionary way to perform an average over the study period. The first results show that there is no correlation between the measures adopted by the countries and the actual circulation of the virus. One can also observe great divergences between countries according to the waves. For example, during the first wave, Southern Europe adopted much more drastic lockdown measures than Northern Europe, a trend that was subsequently reversed. These results will be controlled by the level of GDP or the confidence of citizens in institutions to understand the origin of these differences and their evolutions.