TY - JOUR
T1 - Policymaking during COVID-19
T2 - Preemptive State Interventions and the Factors Influencing Policy Implementation Success
AU - Choi, Seungkyu
AU - Allgood, Michelle
AU - Swindell, David
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - COVID-19
KW - modified multiple stream framework
KW - Multiple stream framework
KW - political entrepreneurs
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U2 - 10.1080/15309576.2022.2123837
DO - 10.1080/15309576.2022.2123837
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85139039372
SN - 1530-9576
JO - Public Performance and Management Review
JF - Public Performance and Management Review
ER -