Bennett Aikey

Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Hicks, Barbara

Area of Concentration

Political Science

Abstract

Covid-19 continues to affect millions globally over two years after it first emerged in Wuhan, China. As viruses spread in our globalized world it is imperative to analyze how political structures, actors, and institutions more broadly contributed to the spread or containment of Covid-19. One such government structure – federalism – at first blush seemed to hinder containment of Covid-19. Intergovernmental cooperation is required to effectively combat the virus in federal systems, and the existence of multiple, self-interested officials in central governments and subnational governments makes cooperation much harder. I hypothesize that the manifold interests of officials nationally and locally beget a fragmented, piecemeal, and languid response to Covid-19. I estimate using an OLS regression the effect of federalism on the stringency of Covid-19 response in individual countries. Finding inconclusive results, I look for differences between federal countries to determine how some developed more successful containment policies than others. In doing so, I rely on the “nested analysis” methodology conceptualized by Lieberman to produce a novel theory pertaining to effective federal response to Covid-19 (2005). This framework was utilized because, when parsing the data, there appeared a large difference in Covid-19 response among federal countries within my data. I identify four factors that tend to affect federal governments’ responses to Covid-19. These four factors are intergovernmental cooperation, decentralization, partisanship, and differences in subnational governments’ capacity. The last three seem to be affected by and mediated through the dynamics of intergovernmental cooperation.

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