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The elephant in the room is almost certainly that poverty causes both parasites and authoritarianism
A large exception would be Russia, and to a lesser extent, all of Eastern Europe. The extreme cold in Russia helps suppress parasites, yet it has historically been authoritarian. It’s also worth noting some of those countries that for awhile provided interesting exceptions, such as Liberia from 1860 to 1990, a famously free country though surrounded by authoritarian territories.
Liberia wasn't particularly free as most of us here might understand the term. While the freed slaves’ constitution was modeled on the US Constitution, civil and political rights applied only to the freed slaves who came over from North America and their descendants, while Liberia’s indigenous population was neglected at the best of times, oppressed at the worst. (And even among the freed slaves’ descendants, those connected with Monrovia’s Masonic Lodge formed a political elite that others could never hope to enter). To a considerable degree, the political strife of the late 20th-century was due to rage at this skewed system of government.
I admit to not having done more than skim the abstract, but couldn't it be just as likely that authoritarian governments cause the spread of disease (and famine, etc.) through ineptitude?
That’s seems especially reasonable to assume if we look at the divide between North Korea and South Korea, a division that has only existed since 1950. South Korea has had increasingly better governance and increasingly less parasites, in contrast to North Korea.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or is it authoritarianism that causes poverty and parasites?
What came first?
But, as the previous posters touched upon, there are some interesting philosophical issues at play here.
First, we have the old correlation vs. causation issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
Then even if there is causation, we need to ask which came first, the parasite prevalence, or the authoritarian government.
Then even if we know the answer to that, we then need to ask if a circular relationship is present, in other words A causes some of B, which in turn causes more of A, which in turn causes more of B.
Basically, if a virtuous or vicious cycle is present (virtuous if more of A and B are desired; vicious if less of A and B are desired; in this case vicious, since presumably less of A and of B are desired...)
It's sort of like you could ask if "breakdowns in society" are responsibile for authoritarian governments -- or if authoritarian governments are responsible for breakdowns in society...
Or, if a little bit of one caused a little bit of the other, which in turn caused more of the first, which in turn caused more of the second, and the cycle became a vicious cycle...
So, the roots of what could be a fascinating philophical discussion in that.
Its sort of like in Star Wars -- we could ask if the breakdown of society caused the early elements of the Empire, which in turn caused the Rebellion, which in turn caused the furher breakdown of society, which caused the further strengthening of the Empire, which in turn caused the further strengthening of the Rebellion (by opposition)...
Vader may have been a key player on one side... but he did not start all of those cycles going...
I was just saying the other day that we're one Coronovirus-like pandemic away from seeing sweeping changes in government policy that lend themselves to authoritarian rule. Changes that go beyond what we've seen on removing the red tape around how hospitals are run and how the spaces within them can re-purposed for other use.
Imagine a virus that has the properties similar to covd-19 but a higher mortality rate, affecting children and working age groups. Containment of a pandemic would be trivial if you knew the location of infected patient and everybody with whom they've been in contact with over a 14 day period. That data is already available from the fact most people are mobile phone users. It's just the data is not shared. Containment would be more specific and targeted. At the moment health professionals rely on self-reporting by patients to follow the spread of a pandemic.
The pretext for dissolving these artificial boundaries between the pools of data owned by corporations, intelligence services, health institutions would be easy to provide in the interest of protecting the government and the public. It would seem both responsible and reasonable to the public if the mortality and symptoms were terrifying enough. It can be argued that China's alleged effectiveness in dealing with the virus in cities with populations larger than LA, London and NY was due to an authoritarian government model. We also see our governments working with the private sector to handle this pandemic.
Governments are scared because they do not have visibility on the pandemic's spread because of problems in scaling tests, using numbers of confirmed cases serve as poor proxies for decisions to be made. I don't think it would be long before someone starts asking the question, if we had richer data on confirmed patients and who they'd been in contact with, could we have nipped this in the but before it had the impact its had on the economy and put the health system at risk.
The elephant in the room is almost certainly that poverty causes both parasites and authoritarianism
In my grossly oversimplified worldview, authoritarianism is shorthand for heightened fear response and lowered empathy.