Policy Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Federal vs. Unitary States

• In Event: Relevance, Quality, and Expedience: Political Science Responds to COVID-19: Comparing and Explaining Policy Reactions and Political Consequences

Abstract

Louis Brandeis famously praised federalism for providing a policy "laboratory," allowing democratic governments at the sub-national level not just to adapt policies to local conditions (as proponents of subsidiarity advocate generally) but also to experiment with different policies in the face of uncertainty of how best to respond to common challenges. One line of federalism scholarship suggests that this view of federalism as a policy laboratory highlights a general strength of federal systems (Weingast 1995; Oates 1999; Kerber & Eckardt 2007; Saam & Kerber 2013), especially when combined with "experimentalist" features that facilitate feedback and learning (Sabel & Zeitlin). Other scholars of federalism, however, suggest that decentralized policymaking creates centrifugal tendencies, impeding the selection of a maximally effective, cohesive policy response, "especially when problem-solving is urgent" (Scharpf 1988:267; Wibbels 2005), making federal systems more likely to adopt counterproductively divergent, conflict-inducing policies. We hypothesize that the extent to which federal systems can reap the learning benefits rather than suffer the pathologies of federalism depends upon the degree of sub-national autonomy of political demands for public policy, so as to allow for experimentation, yet also embeddedness into a common national political discourse to allow for feedback and learning.
A common shock, such as the coronavirus pandemic, provides an ideal opportunity to advance our understanding of the consequences of institutional differences (Katzenstein 1978; Gourevitch 1986; 2010), while the cross-nationally temporally staggered exposure to the shock allows for a strong test of the learning hypothesis. Our paper centers on an analysis of original data from the CoronaNet-Project (https://coronanet-project.org), founded and led by five of the co-authors. It compiles data on more than 16,000 distinct government responses to the COVID-19/coronavirus pandemic from around the world, including policies adopted by federal and non-federal states at the national and, for select countries, sub-national level. These data allow us to analyze aggregate as well as highly detailed similarities and differences.

Authors

• Tim Buthe, Technical University of Munich (TUM)

• Joan Barcelo, New York University Abu Dhabi

• Paula Daniela Ganga, Columbia University

• Allison Spencer Hartnett, University of Southern California

• Cindy Cheng, Technical University of Munich

• Luca Elias Messerschmidt, TUM School of Governance

• Robert Kubinec, Princeton University