State Capacity and Policy Tools in Crisis Response: Asia’s COVID-19 Experience

• In Event: Policymaking and Responsiveness in Taiwan During COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

COVID-19 is an exogenous shock to the world. Confronted with the pandemic, all states have implemented a wide range of policies to fight the disease and to mitigate the political, social, and economic impacts of the crisis. An effective strategy should involve combinations between disease prevention (e.g., measures such as border control, regulations for mask-wearing and social distancing, etc.), disease detection (e.g., measures such as screening incoming travelers, contact tracing, quarantine policy, and testing policy, etc.), and disease treatment (e.g., healthcare facility surge capacity, and vaccine research, etc.).

Despite the same goal, governments vary in terms of the policy dimension they focus on and the policy tools used to achieve the intended policy goals. For example, while South Korea puts a more balanced effort between disease prevention and detection, and centers on expanding testing capacity, Taiwan tilts heavily on disease prevention and relies on the facemask policy. On the other hand, we see countries like Thailand and Indonesia only adopting some levels of health monitoring at the border at the early stage of the crisis. To a large extent, a state’s crisis response is constrained by the pre-existing political institutions: their capacity levels. This is especially true in the early stage of this pandemic when the coronavirus was still confined to Asia. With less information but higher uncertainty at the time, China’s neighboring countries had to organize a crisis response based on their perceptions of the crisis.

This paper develops a framework that combines political institutions and the policy tools literature to help us understand how state capacity affects the types and timings of policies used in crisis management. Building upon the policy tools typology developed by Schneider and Ingram (1990), the novelty of this paper lies in exploring the political dimensions of public policy during crisis responses. This paper argues that state capacity affects the complexity of policy tools used in crisis governance. A more capable state would pick and focus on only a few policy dimensions and, within each policy dimension, utilize more diverse and complex policy tools to achieve the intended policy goals. In contrast, in a state with limited capacity, the government is more constrained with respect to the type of tools they can employ. They are more likely to use the same policy tools across many policy dimensions to acheive the intended policy goals.

We test our arguments with five China’s neighboring countries that are ranked differently on the state capacity spectrum (ordered from high to low): Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Thailand. Through official statements and documents, we collect each policy measure these states took in response to COVID-19 in the early stage, from December 31, 2019 (when China notified the WHO about the coronavirus) to March 12, 2020 (when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic and became a worldwide problem). All measures and regulations are sorted by the policy tool type and by time. We then compare the policies used at four different stages: from December 2019 to when the first case was recorded, the first case till the 14th day after the first case, the one-hundredth case and the 14 days afterward, and the number of cases (if beyond one hundred cases) on March 12 when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. Not all countries experience all four stages. Only South Korea and Singapore had more than 100 cases on March 12. We take stock of the policy dimension being focused on and the policy tools used during these four stages. Comparison across time and space shows that more capable states (Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) deployed more policy tools in more targeted policy domains even before the first case was recorded in the country. Less capable states (Indonesia, and Thailand) react slower during this period and would rely mostly on authoritative border control as the main policy tool. A less capable state is also more likely to react to case increases with sudden policy shifts and more strict policy tools. In contrast, more capable states would increase policy intensity more gradually.

The paper contributes to our understanding of government response variation and the extent to which state capacity enables/constrains the choices of policy responses, especially during the early stage of the COVID-19 crisis.


Reference:
Schneider, Anne, and Helen Ingram. 1990. “Behavioral Assumptions of Policy Tools.” The Journal of Politics 52 (2): 510–29.

Authors

• Wei-Ting Yen, Franklin & Marshall College

• Li-Yin Liu, University of Dayton

• Eunji Won, Northern Illinois University

• Fnu Testriono, Northern Illinois University