Diffusion by Leadership: The WHO’s Mechanism to Promote Policies against COVID-19
2025-07-22
In the early months of 2020, governments faced the rapid spread of COVID-19. To navigate the storm of conflicting information about the danger posed by this new disease, countries sought guidance about when and how to respond to it. We argue that the World Health Organization (WHO) played a central role in the diffusion of policies against COVID-19 by exercising leadership. We develop the concept of leadership as a diffusion mechanism to explain how the WHO influenced governments to close schools and workplaces and cancel public events within weeks, despite its lack of strong enforcement mechanisms. Results from five event-history models show the significance of the WHO’s pandemic declaration on March 11, 2020 that mobilized countries to adopt the measures recommended by the organization. However, that declaration did not affect the diffusion of policies that the WHO advised against adopting.