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1 These broad institutional, political, and epidemiological similarities at the national level serve to highlight the value of a subnational and multilevel perspective for explaining the striking differences in pandemic policymaking observed across the three countries. Moreover, the three countries converge in ranking among the most severely affected by COVID-19 worldwide. In addition to their shared presidential and federal institutional designs, all three countries were led by populist presidents who were skeptical of both the gravity of the pandemic and scientific expertise.

The next section describes policy responses in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States over a ten-month period from March to December 2020. 2020 Banerjee and Nayak 2020 Lurie et al. Understanding the determinants of cross-state variation in pandemic responses is especially important because of growing evidence that stringent social distancing policies reduce population mobility and, in turn, COVID-19 transmission ( Badr et al. To explain variation in how states inside countries responded to the pandemic, we propose and test a framework centered on political factors that help or, alternatively, hinder federations in producing coordinated subnational policy responses.

Even in Brazil, where a highly fragmented political party system and weak president generally inhibited cross-state coordination, the nine states of the Northeast region still managed to align their social distancing policies. Likewise, in the United States several regional coalitions were formed by state governors, with participating states adopting consistently more stringent policies than their non-participating peers. In Mexico, for example, coordination among the nine states affiliated with the Nueva Convivencia Social/ New Social Coexistence (NCS) coalition produced alignment in their levels of policy stringency. Second, this critique obscures the fact that even inside federations seen as emblematic of these limits-such as Brazil, Mexico, and the United States-there is clear evidence of policy coordination among some states. First, they ignore the fact that some federations, such as Argentina and Germany, did take early, coordinated, and effective action in response to the crisis ( Sugarman 2020 Bennhold 2020). For instance, Haffajee and Mello (2020, 2) point to the “dark side” of federalism in contrasting the assortment of state-level pandemic responses across the United States with the more homogeneous responses inside unitary countries.īroad claims about the limits of federalism for addressing COVID-19 fall short for two reasons. The flexibility to produce tailored policy outcomes is often praised as a virtue of federalism, but in the context of COVID-19, some see the subnational patchwork of policy responses as a fatal flaw. Federal political systems, by their nature, often lack territorial uniformity across policy areas, including healthcare ( Giraudy and Pribble 2020 McGuire 2010 Moncrieff and Lawless 2016), education ( Manna 2006 McGuinn 2016), and crime control ( Eaton 2008 Miller 2008 Snyder and Durán-Martínez 2009), among others. The COVID-19 pandemic poses one of the greatest policy challenges of our time, requiring decisive and coordinated action from policymakers. Together, these findings highlight how a multilevel framework attuned to varied combinations of intra-unit, cross-unit, and cross-level causal factors strengthens our understanding of pandemic policymaking. In Brazil, in contrast, where there is little evidence of either policy coordination or alignment, state-level policies resulted instead from intrastate factors and diffusion. In the United States and Mexico, statistical and qualitative evidence indicates that interstate collaboration among governors, combined with top-down pressures from national party elites and presidents, led to greater policy alignment among coordinated states. Introducing a novel framework for explaining pandemic policymaking, the study shows the central importance of political parties, presidential power, and governors’ coalitions in determining state-level policy stringency. Why do COVID-19 social distancing policies vary so widely across states in federal countries? This mixed-methods study of Brazil, Mexico, and the United States finds that state-level variation in the stringency of social distancing policies is driven not by the epidemiological, demographic, or socioeconomic factors commonly emphasized in previous research, but largely by political factors.