Pandemic Politics
As part of the CoronaNet Research Project I am participating in the largest database of goverment responses to the corona virus. The main focus is to collect world wide information on the various ways governments have taken action to defeat the pandemic. I am the regional manager for the Western Europe region and more information can be found at https://www.coronanet-project.org/ .
Patterns of Policy Responses to the COVID-19/Coronavirus Pandemic in Federal vs. Unitary States
with Tim Büthe, Joan Barceló, Cindy Cheng, Allison Spencer Hartnett, Robert Kubinec & Luca Messerschmidt
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 and Eckardt 2007; Saam and Kerber 2013), especially when combined with "experimentalist" features that facilitate feedback and learning. 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). It compiles data on more than 75,000 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.
SSRN link of the paper HERE.
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). It compiles data on more than 75,000 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.
SSRN link of the paper HERE.
The coercive capacity of COVID-19 policies: The rule of law or the rule of fear?
with Caress Schenk
This paper analyzes the degree to which states with high coercive capacity rely on that capacity in the COVID-19 era. The study of authoritarian states has shifted in recent years from positing that people comply with the regime out of fear or as a result of co-optation, to suggesting that information manipulation and other public appeals are central to regime strategies (Guriev and Treisman 2019; Greene and Robertson 2019; Rosenfeld 2020). We seek to understand how different types of COVID-19 policies elucidate the preferences for coercive versus information-based strategies for inducing compliance. Despite early assessments of COVID-19 responses that focused on regime type as a primary explanatory variable (Kleinfeld 2020; Berengaut 2020), scholars quickly realized that the effects of the crisis cannot be neatly divided into those experienced by democracies or autocracies (Fukuyama 2020). This paper, therefore, looks beyond regime-level variables to compare different policy types in a state capacity framework. Using a mixed-methods approach that begins with ethnographic observations from Kazakhstan, the paper pans out to analyze a cross-national selection of countries on indicators of state capacity (in particular coercive capacity), the rule of law, COVID-19 policies, and mobility data.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, authoritarian Kazakhstan’s policy orientation seemed to take a page from the police-state playbook. Once lockdowns were announced, signs appeared warning citizens of penalties, fines or administrative arrest for violations, police regularly patrolled public and residential areas, sometimes announcing the rules over loudspeaker, and the number of arrests was frequently reported. Compliance was high. After the state of emergency was lifted in mid-May, businesses opened and life returned quickly nearly to normal. Despite regular warnings from the government about policies requiring masks and social distancing, compliance became weak and people were openly skeptical about the threat of the virus at the same time that cases began rising sharply. The government’s response has likewise been markedly less enforcement-oriented than during the lockdown. These on-the-ground observations, systematized through media and social media analysis and observational data of compliance practices such as mask wearing, demonstrate variation over time within the single case of Kazakhstan. This same pattern is also visible in other cases and drives the main questions of our paper: what types of policies are governments using to induce compliance? Which of these policies are most effective? The cross-national analysis looks both at policy types and policy timing related to these questions.
We use the CoronaNet Project Database, a large hand-coded dataset of more than 75,000 policy announcements made by governments across the world since December 2019 throughout the COVID-19 crisis. Policy types are divided into those that regulate personal behavior (wearing masks, stay at home orders, and restrictions of movement involving surveillance or requiring permits), those regulating institutions (school and business shut-downs), and public awareness measures that seek to educate the public and produce behavioral compliance. Different policy types will logically produce different enforcement strategies that are to varying degrees labor intensive and coercion intensive. Do certain types of policies reduce movement better than others? Do certain types of policies produce more of a movement backlash once relaxed? The answers to these questions will help us to understand if states with coercive capacity are utilizing that capacity effectively.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, authoritarian Kazakhstan’s policy orientation seemed to take a page from the police-state playbook. Once lockdowns were announced, signs appeared warning citizens of penalties, fines or administrative arrest for violations, police regularly patrolled public and residential areas, sometimes announcing the rules over loudspeaker, and the number of arrests was frequently reported. Compliance was high. After the state of emergency was lifted in mid-May, businesses opened and life returned quickly nearly to normal. Despite regular warnings from the government about policies requiring masks and social distancing, compliance became weak and people were openly skeptical about the threat of the virus at the same time that cases began rising sharply. The government’s response has likewise been markedly less enforcement-oriented than during the lockdown. These on-the-ground observations, systematized through media and social media analysis and observational data of compliance practices such as mask wearing, demonstrate variation over time within the single case of Kazakhstan. This same pattern is also visible in other cases and drives the main questions of our paper: what types of policies are governments using to induce compliance? Which of these policies are most effective? The cross-national analysis looks both at policy types and policy timing related to these questions.
We use the CoronaNet Project Database, a large hand-coded dataset of more than 75,000 policy announcements made by governments across the world since December 2019 throughout the COVID-19 crisis. Policy types are divided into those that regulate personal behavior (wearing masks, stay at home orders, and restrictions of movement involving surveillance or requiring permits), those regulating institutions (school and business shut-downs), and public awareness measures that seek to educate the public and produce behavioral compliance. Different policy types will logically produce different enforcement strategies that are to varying degrees labor intensive and coercion intensive. Do certain types of policies reduce movement better than others? Do certain types of policies produce more of a movement backlash once relaxed? The answers to these questions will help us to understand if states with coercive capacity are utilizing that capacity effectively.
Legacies of transition, populism and compliance with COVID-19 policies. Regional variety in policy compliance across Eastern Europe
Thanks to funding from the Regional Studies Association's Grant on Pandemics, Cities, Regions and Industry I have been able to explore in depth the impact of Communist legacies in explaining the early success of Eastern European countries in dealing with the pandemic as well as the failures of the system as the pandemic progressed. Project in Progress.
Abstract: The rapid development and severity of COVID-19 crisis has been a test for governments across the world. This project examines government responses to the pandemic within Eastern Europe, a region with research relevance for scholars of post-Communist studies and of European integration processes. Moreover, in the context of the recent populist wave, focusing on this region provides additional insight for other countries that have seen populist leaders govern during the pandemic. I draw on recent research on COVID-19 in the US, Western Europe and the former Soviet space as well as prior work on populism in Western and Eastern Europe to argue that the varied experiences across Eastern Europe can be explained by the diverging legacies these countries had during their post-Communist transition period as well as whether or not the country has recently experienced a rise in populism. Drawing on my extensive work in the region I will compare case studies such as Hungary and Poland which have seen both substantial political and economic success during transition as well as strong right wing populist parties in power curtailing the rule of law and compare them to relatively less successful transitions such as those of Romania or Bulgaria. These qualitative case studies are compared in their COVID-19 policies at the national and subnational level using data collected via the CoronaNet Project. In addition to the qualitative case studies I will also examine the entire region quantitatively to find the way government action and policy compliance mapped onto transition legacies and current populist attitudes across the region.
Abstract: The rapid development and severity of COVID-19 crisis has been a test for governments across the world. This project examines government responses to the pandemic within Eastern Europe, a region with research relevance for scholars of post-Communist studies and of European integration processes. Moreover, in the context of the recent populist wave, focusing on this region provides additional insight for other countries that have seen populist leaders govern during the pandemic. I draw on recent research on COVID-19 in the US, Western Europe and the former Soviet space as well as prior work on populism in Western and Eastern Europe to argue that the varied experiences across Eastern Europe can be explained by the diverging legacies these countries had during their post-Communist transition period as well as whether or not the country has recently experienced a rise in populism. Drawing on my extensive work in the region I will compare case studies such as Hungary and Poland which have seen both substantial political and economic success during transition as well as strong right wing populist parties in power curtailing the rule of law and compare them to relatively less successful transitions such as those of Romania or Bulgaria. These qualitative case studies are compared in their COVID-19 policies at the national and subnational level using data collected via the CoronaNet Project. In addition to the qualitative case studies I will also examine the entire region quantitatively to find the way government action and policy compliance mapped onto transition legacies and current populist attitudes across the region.