Punctuated Equilibrium Dynamics During Crisis

• In Event: Punctuated Equilibrium Theory and Comparative Political Institutions

Abstract

Policy responses to issues of national interest tend to differ between nations and are usually disproportionate to the potential costs of, or benefits derived from, policy. These patterns are explained by punctuated equilibrium dynamics as proceeding from the nexus between bounded rationality and institutional friction. While the body of literature is rich in its empirical support for PET dynamics, less is known about whether these dynamics are generalizable to a broad range of democratic and non-democratic systems and hold true in compressed timeframes. In this study, daily time series data across a 22-month period, from January 2020 to October 2021, is used to model the univariate distributions of daily COVID-19 related policy changes for four groups of political systems (i.e., democratic, minimally democratic, autocratic, and closed autocratic). By modelling the univariate distributions of policy change and evaluating L-kurtosis values, we evaluate whether the expectations of PET dynamics hold true for different political systems and within compressed timeframes in crises. The context of the COVID-19 pandemic is used as the global public health crisis has impacted a broad gamut of political systems over an extended duration and provides a unique context within which policy responses may be evaluated. With this analysis, we aim to contribute to the body of work by evaluating generalizability of PET dynamics beyond a few select democratic nations, building upon the hypothesis of scale invariance by postulating that PET dynamics are also characterized by temporal invariance—and therefore expected to occur in both extended and compressed periods of time, particularly in periods of crisis.

Authors

• Saahir Shafi, Penn State University - Harrisburg

• Daniel J Mallinson, Penn State, Harrisburg