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In 1832, a cholera epidemic hit Paris. In just a few months, the disease killed 20,000 of the city’s 650,000 people. Most of the deaths occurred in urban centers, where the many poor workers drawn to Paris by the Industrial Revolution lived in squalid conditions. The spread of disease increased class tensions, with the rich blaming the poor for the spread of the disease, and the poor thinking they were being poisoned. Soon hostility and anger began to be directed against the unpopular king.The funeral of General Lamarck, a victim of the pandemic and a defender of the people’s cause, sparked massive anti-government demonstrations in barricaded streets: a scene immortalized in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables. Historians argue that the interaction between the epidemic and existing tensions was the main cause of what became known as the Paris Uprising of 1832, which led to the subsequent government in the French capital in 1919. They argue that this could explain the repression and popular revolt.th century.
If history is a predictor, anxiety could reignite as the pandemic subsides.
From Justinian’s plague and the Black Death to the 1918 influenza pandemic, disease outbreaks throughout history cast long shadows on societies, shaping politics, disrupting social order, and ultimately causing social unrest. Examples abound. why? One possible reason is that infectious disease outbreaks expose or exacerbate existing fault lines in society, such as lack of social safety nets, lack of trust in institutions, and perceptions of government apathy, incompetence, and corruption. This means that there is a possibility that Historically, outbreaks of infectious diseases have also caused ethnic or religious backlash or exacerbated tensions between economic classes.
Despite a wealth of examples, quantitative evidence on the association between infectious diseases and social anxiety is scarce and limited to specific episodes. His recent IMF staff study fills this gap by providing global evidence of this association in recent decades.
An important challenge in research on social anxiety is to identify when anxiety events occur. Sources of information about the riots are available, but many are infrequent and inconsistent in their coverage. To address these shortcomings, his recent IMF staff paper uses an index based on news coverage of social unrest to create a reported social unrest index. It provides a consistent monthly measure of social unrest in 130 countries from 1985 to the present. The spike in the index aligns very closely with narrative descriptions of anxiety in various case studies, suggesting that the index is capturing real events rather than changes in media sentiment or attention. .
An IMF staff survey using this indicator found that countries experiencing more frequent and severe outbreaks also experienced, on average, greater anxiety.
During and immediately after the pandemic, social scarring in the form of anxiety may not be immediately apparent. Indeed, a humanitarian crisis is likely to disrupt the communications and transportation necessary to organize large-scale protests. Additionally, public opinion may favor unity and unity in times of persecution. In some cases, incumbent governments use emergencies to consolidate power and suppress opposition. So far, the COVID-19 experience is consistent with this historical pattern. In fact, the number of large-scale riots around the world has fallen to its lowest level in nearly five years. Notable exceptions include the United States and Lebanon, but even in these cases, the largest protests have been related to issues that could potentially worsen, but not directly affected by COVID-19. It’s not the cause.
But beyond the immediate effects, the risk of social unrest skyrockets in the long term. IMF staff research uses information on types of anxiety to focus on the forms anxiety typically takes after an outbreak. This analysis shows that the risk of riots and anti-government demonstrations increases over time. Additionally, the study also found evidence of an increased risk of major government crises, events that threaten to bring down governments, which typically occur two years after a severe infectious disease outbreak.
If history is a predictor, anxiety could reignite as the pandemic subsides. The threat may be even greater if the crisis exposes or exacerbates existing problems such as lack of trust in institutions, poor governance, poverty, and inequality.
This article was first published IMF Research Perspectives.