Social policy responses to COVID‐19 in Canada and the United States: Explaining policy variations between two liberal welfare state regimes

Abstract

Canada and the United States are often grouped together as liberal welfare‐state regimes, with broadly similar levels of social spending. Yet, as the COVID‐19 pandemic reveals, the two countries engage in highly divergent approaches to social policymaking during a massive public health emergency. Drawing on evidence from the first 5 months of the pandemic, this article compares social policy measures taken by the United States and Canadian governments in response to COVID‐19. In general, we show that Canadian responses were both more rapid and comprehensive than those of the United States. This variation, we argue, can be explained by analysing the divergent political institutions, pre‐existing policy legacies, and variations in cross‐partisan consensus, which have all shaped national decision‐making in the middle of the crisis.

Social policy in the face of a global pandemic: Policy responses to the COVID‐19 crisis

“…The papers stress how early responses to COVID‐19 seeking to reduce insecurity, stabilize incomes, and prevent an economic freefall, are shaped at least in part by existing policy legacies, including those associated with specific policy areas and welfare regimes (e.g., the balance between targeted and universal benefits), as well as with concrete instruments deployed (e.g., wage subsidies vs. temporary unemployment) or territorial arrangements (e.g., centralization‐decentralization nexus). Even when we compare to decentralized federal systems such as Canada and the United States, variation in the level of centralization from one country to the next within the same policy area such as unemployment insurance can shape national social policy responses (Béland et al, 2021).…”

“…Responses to COVID‐19 vary sometimes greatly from country to country in ways that reflect, at least in part, existing national policy legacies. This is clearly the case when we compare Canada and the United States, where the varying relationship between federalism and existing policy legacies in the field of unemployment insurance has shaped in part national responses in each of these two liberal counties (Béland et al, 2021). At a broader level, according to Béland et al (2021), in Canada, social policy responses to COVID‐19 proved more rapid and comprehensive than comparable US responses, a variation they attribute to specific national policy legacies, but also to divergent political institutions and patterns of cross‐partisan consensus.…”

“…In compiling the special issue, we were eager to ensure coverage of a wide range of countries representing a variety of welfare regimes. In total, the papers in this volume cover: Canada and the USA (Béland, Dinan, Rocco, & Waddan, 2021), Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland (Greve, Blomquist, Hvinden, & Gerven, 2021); Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany (Cantillon, Seeleib‐Kaiser, & van der Veen, 2021); the UK and Ireland (Hick and Murphy, 2021); Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain (Moreira, Léon, Coda Moscarola, & Roumpakis, 2021); Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia (Aidukaite, Saxonberg, Szelewa, & Szikra, 2021), and China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan (Soon, Chou, & Shi, 2021). In addition to these comparative country case‐studies, there are two additional papers—the first, comparing an initial overview of short‐term social policy responses and comparing these to the responses to the Great Recession (Moreira and Hick, 2021) and the second an examination of the changes in the EU institutions (de la Porte and Jensen, 2021).…”

Transitivity Analysis of Kamala Harris’ 2020 Presidential Victory Speech Concerning COVID-19

“…This relates to the BLM protest which was triggered by the killing of George Floyd and later caused massive rage in the black community. BLM protest in the USA is concerned with equality and equity law enforcement issues in which for the most part, black communities in the USA face many racial judgements and different treatment especially during this pandemic such as higher unemployment rates and different access to medical health facilities (Béland, Dinan, Rocco, & Waddan, 2020;Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020;Korhonen & Granberg, 2020). In other words, the BLM movement seeks to find freedom of justice for its people of colour.…”

Food Insecurity amid the COVID-19 Pandemic: Food Charity, Government Assistance, and Employment

“…As the pandemic took root in Canada in March 2020, the federal government implemented a series of measures to provide income supports to individuals whose livelihoods were impacted by local and provincial policies minmizing viral transmission (Robson 2020, Béland et al 2020. Employment Insurance (EI) (Government of Canada 2020c), the traditional wage replacement tool for the involuntarily unemployed, was made more generous and accessible to workers: the maximum duration of the regular EI benefit was doubled while medical proof was waived for EI sickness benefit applications (Robson 2020).…”