Collaboration in Crisis? Policy Conformity and COVID Outcomes in the U.S. States

• In Event: Federalism and Local Politics in the United States

Abstract

Since early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly reshaped societal norms, tested healthcare systems, and prompted unprecedented responses from both the government and individuals in the United States and elsewhere. Much has been written about the effects of COVID, with even more interrogating the effectiveness (or lack of effectiveness) of governmental responses. A major theme in this literature focuses on the weakness of federal governmental systems in terms of responding to this, and other, public health crises. Federal systems are blessed and cursed by the policy variation they allow at subnational levels. While such flexibility enables subnational units to experiment with policy solutions to crises such as COVID, they fail to enforce inter-jurisdictional policy conformity. This is particularly a problem when state units have incentives to compete for economic growth by reducing health-maximizing regulations, as with COVID. Variable regulations across jurisdictions can lead to negative spillovers, which raises the question: how important is policy coordination in conditioning outcomes from this inter-jurisdictional policy problem? In this paper, I draw from studies of policy diffusion and intergovernmental cooperation to sketch a theory which posits that policy coordination between states can enhance the effectiveness of within-state policy solutions to the COVID pandemic. This coordination is operationalized by measuring average regional policy similarity using a text reuse algorithm (a la Linder, Desmarais, Burgess, and Giraudy, PSJ 2018). Empirically, the current paper finds that when states have high degrees of policy conformity with their geographic neighbors, those states see improvements in COVID-19 mortality and hospitalization rates.
This research contributes much to our understanding of how federal systems of government can effectively address health policy problems with inter-jurisdictional causes, like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Author

• Robert J. McGrath, George Mason University