Federalism in a Time of Plague: How Federal Systems Cope With Pandemic

Abstract

This article compares and constrasts the responses of Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United States to the COVID-19 outbreak and spread. The pandemic has posed special challenges to these federal systems. Although federal systems typically have many advantages—they can adapt policies to local conditions, for example, and experiment with different solutions to problems—pandemics and people cross regional borders, and controlling contagion requires a great deal of national coordination and intergovernmental cooperation. The four federal systems vary in their relative distribution of powers between regional and national governments, in the way that health care is administered, and in the variation in policies across regions. We focus on the early responses to COVID-19, from January through early May 2020. Three of these countries—Australia, Canada, and Germany—have done well in the crisis. They have acted quickly, done extensive testing and contact tracing, and had a relatively uniform set of policies across the country. The United States, in contrast, has had a disastrous response, wasting months at the start of the virus outbreak, with limited testing, poor intergovernmental cooperation, and widely divergent policies across the states and even within some states. The article seeks to explain both the relative uniform responses of these three very different federal systems, and the sharply divergent response of the United States.

Policy capacity, local autonomy, and human agency: tensions in the intergovernmental coordination in Indonesia’s social welfare response amid the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in late December 2019, the magnitude of impacts has been globally unprecedented and has both exacerbated as well as presented new problems and challenges for governments. The pandemic has drawn intense interest in governments and how they navigate the often-competing health and economic imperatives relative to the type of their political system (Hodge et al, 2020;Kavanagh & Singh, 2020;Navarro, 2020;Rozell & Wilcox, 2020;Thomson & Ip, 2020). Across many countries, the response to the pandemic by governments has pointed to tensions between health directives aimed at curbing the spread of the disease, such as restricting movement, partial or full lockdowns, and work-from-home directives; and the economic impacts of such measures, where there are also tensions between different political leaders and layers of government.…”

Bad law or implementation flaws? Lessons from the implementation of the new law on epidemics during the response to the first wave of COVID-19 in Switzerland

“…The type of decentralized decision-making and organization of health systems common to most federalist states - in regular times - has the advantage of being very responsive to local population needs ( 45 ). However, during a public health crisis it requires a high degree of collegiality, which can make the decision-making process quite lengthy and thus inconsistent with the decisive timing required in a public health crisis ( 46 ). Decentralization of health authority also exacerbates the risk of political rent-seeking behaviour among local administrators.…”

Culture, Institution, and COVID-19 First-Response Policy: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Thirty-One Countries

“…A centralized political system demonstrates tight coupling characteristics between central and local governments, whereas a decentralized system is characterized by loose coupling (Zhou 2020). From a crisis management perspective, a decentralized system is preferred because local governments can develop a sense of locality in emergency planning and can experiment with different solutions (Kusumasari et al 2010;Rozell and Wilcox 2020). However, as an unprecedented crisis, COVID-19 requires quick and forceful responses under time pressure and high uncertainty.…”