Search for: All records

Abstract Interstate compacts are formal structures through which multiple states work together towards a common goal or shared agenda. Previous research on compacts focuses almost exclusively on the decision to join the compact, leaving questions on post‐formation diffusion patterns unexplored. We use a unique case of three interstate compacts that form simultaneously around the same issue—the COVID‐19 pandemic—to test how policy diffuses within compacts. We employ a novel diffusion methodology, network event history analysis (NEHA), to determine the role of compact membership in policy activity. We find that compact member states are no more active in adopting policy than non‐members, but that non‐member states use compacts to free ride when making their own adoption choices. We find that compacts serve to establish members as leaders, as non‐members' policy adoptions are strongly driven by the adoptions of compact members. We also find COVID‐19 policy diffusion to be strongly driven by state ideology. 

Subnational governments in the United States have taken the lead on many aspects of the response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. Variation in government activity across states offers the opportunity to analyze responses in comparable settings. We study a common and informative activity among state officials—state legislators’ attention to the pandemic on Twitter. We find that legislators’ attention to the pandemic strongly correlates with the number of cases in the legislator’s state, the national count of new deaths, and the number of pandemic‐related public policies passed within the legislator’s state. Furthermore, we find that the degree of responsiveness to pandemic indicators differs significantly across political parties, with Republicans exhibiting weaker responses, on average. Lastly, we find significant differences in the content of tweets about the pandemic by Democratic and Republican legislators, with Democrats focused on health indicators and impacts, and Republicans focused on business impacts and opening the economy. 

Theories in political science are most commonly tested through comparisons of means via difference tests or regression, but some theoretical frameworks offer implications regarding other distributional features. I consider the literature on models of policy change, and their implications for the thickness of the tails in the distribution of policy change. Change in public policy output is commonly characterized by periods of stasis that are punctuated by dramatic change—a heavy-tailed distribution of policy change. Heavy-tailed policy change is used to differentiate between the incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium models of policy change. The evidentiary value of heavy-tailed outputs rests on the assumption that changes in inputs are normally distributed. I show that, in order for conventional assumptions to imply normally distributed inputs, variance in the within-time distribution of inputs must be assumed to be constant over time. I present this result, and then present an empirical example of a possible aggregate policy input—a major public opinion survey item—that exhibits over-time variation in within-time variance. I conclude that the results I present should serve as motivation for those interested in testing the implications of punctuated equilibrium theory to adopt more flexible assumptions regarding, and endeavor to measure, policy inputs.