In the absence of a large‐scale federal response to the COVID‐19 pandemic, state and local elected officials have enacted executive orders that include restrictions on public liberties as well as the suspension of rules and regulations. While these restrictive policy actions have received extensive media attention, the suspensions, including regulatory rollbacks, waivers, and extensions, are lesser known. This Viewpoint essay offers insight from a working database that captures the nuance and variation across restrictions, suspensions, and enforcement mechanisms being utilized at the state level.

The United States' response to COVID-19 has been predominantly led by state governments. To understand if, why, and how state governments include enforcement language in their executive order response, this article conducts an analysis based on 1,357 coded executive orders. It is found that decisions to include enforcement language are influenced by a governor's political circumstances and perceived risks associated with the crisis. This paper offers insight into how these findings are important for future research and an explanation of the distinct ways that US state governments are choosing to address

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What constitutes "good" performance in a law enforcement agency, who decides, and how does public recognition of that performance change how an agency performs? This study uses a quasiexperimental design and propensity-score matching model to assess the impact of a law enforcement agency's status as a finalist for the annual Cisco/International Chiefs of Police Association (IACP) Community Policing Award on performance in future years, as measured by crime clearance rates. It is found that after comparing the treated group (finalist agencies) with the untreated group (non-finalist nearest-neighbor agencies), there is no meaningful difference in crime clearance rates. This unexpected finding establishes that the public recognition of finalist status by the Department of Justice, which promotes finalist agencies as exemplars of best practices in community policing, does not impact the subsequent performance of those agencies.Additionally, the results of the model suggest that the impact of symbolic politics and social construction on the award finalist selection process and the choice by DOJ to promote the practices of those agencies should be explored. Questions are also raised as to the utility of crime clearance rates as a performance measure, and future avenues for research in each area are proposed.

Research and attention to federalism has vastly increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While political polarization has largely been used as a scapegoat to explain the U.S. policy response to the pandemic, federalism has also been credited and blamed for the policy response and has played an important role in providing avenues for conflict. This article explores intra-state conflict stemming from COVID-19. We utilize ten exploratory cases to identify three distinct but interrelated patterns of conflict that emerged within U.S. states, focusing on tensions between the executive and legislative branches, between bureaucratic officials and the legislature, and between state and local governments. We then examine a series of questions regarding the implication of these conflicts, focusing on the issuance of executive orders, the responses undertaken by officials who disagreed with and sought to push back against these orders, and the ways that inter-branch and inter-governmental disagreements about these orders were resolved.