Policymaking during COVID-19: Preemptive State Interventions and the Factors Influencing Policy Implementation Success

Abstract

COVID-19 sparked a public health crisis and created a series of public policy challenges. This article examines how COVID-19 interventions played out at the state level given the absence of guidance and coordinated national response. We focus on how the level of policy rigidness and enforcement of behavioral interventions helps us understand the success and failures of reducing the number of positive test rates over a 20-week period (March–July 2020). Specifically, we examine how four specific interventions (masking, school closures, restaurant closures, and travel restrictions) moved through the policy creation and implementation process as outlined by a modified version of Kingdon’s multiple streams approach. We leverage a pooled-OLS approach to identify the agenda-setting and decision-making windows to verify the narrative derived from applying a modified multiple streams approach to the initial wave of policy making around COVID-19 interventions. Using this technique, we find evidence of two distinct agenda-setting windows and a decision-making window. Using these windows, we ascertain that highly restrictive policies are effective in controlling the spread of COVID-19. We find that governors acting as political entrepreneurs may not play as large of a role in the policy-making process, but they are responsive to constituent policy preferences.

Keywords:

• Multiple stream framework
• modified multiple stream framework
• political entrepreneurs
• COVID-19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The complete scales can be found in the Appendix.

2 Some formal provisions included caveats around the use of the power. We have elected to recognize any formal recognition of authority as a mark of executive power.

3 While this case study examines the policy-making process in relation to the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing the decision window on May 2020–July 2020, we have tried to address a compounding problem stream (unemployment) by controlling for new unemployment claims for each state for each week.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Seungkyu Choi

Seungkyu Choi is a doctoral student in Public Administration and Policy at Arizona State University. His research focuses on local governance, urban policy, and policy innovation.

Michelle Allgood

Michelle Allgood is a doctoral candidate at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on public management, workplace coping and employee well-being, and equity and access issues, especially for members of the disability community.

David Swindell

David Swindell is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University (ASU). He is also the Director of ASU’s Center for Urban Innovation. His research focuses on performance measurement, city management, and economic development.