Politics
Why won’t states learn from each other during COVID-19?
The COVID-19 pandemic lays bare the complications of the American federal system. Plenty of ink has been spilt debating whether federalism is good or bad in the context of the current crisis.
President Trump’s quoting of Christopher DeMuth’s Wall Street Journal op-ed illustrates this. DeMuth praises Trump’s apparent “use” of federalism (i.e., relying on state and local governments) and the private sector in responding to COVID-19. “‘He’s given pride of place to federalism and private enterprise, lauding the patriotism and proficiency of our fantastic governors and mayors’ — meaning, I do call them fantastic when it’s appropriate — ‘and our incredible business leaders and genius companies.’ I guess I probably use those terms too, when they’re doing a good job. When they’re not doing a good job, I don’t use those terms.” (President Trump’s words in italics).
Others, such as public administration scholar Don Kettl, decry the fact that citizens are receiving very different public health protections, depending on where they live. Some of the befuddling things observed during this crisis have, in fact, received a lot of attention from state politics and federalism scholars over the last decade. Uncooperative federalism, ceiling preemption, the fiscal squeeze on states, federal gridlock, a punitive federal approach to states, and much more has captured the attention of researchers. Each plays a role in understanding the challenges we are now facing.
I’ve been most interested in how policy innovations emerge and spread throughout the system. This phenomenon is called policy diffusion. Fluctuations in the relationship between the states and federal government have an impact on what issues emerge, where, and when. My ongoing research, including that with A. Lee Hannah on marijuana policy, examines these dynamics both narrowly for drug policy and broadly for other policies adopted across a long span of time.
Traditionally, state governments were thought to be heavily influenced by their immediate neighbors when considering how they would solve public problems. This made sense in days when communications were limited geographically, but cross-state partnerships and technology have changed this communication dynamic. That said, it is still logical to expect that neighbors influence each other, as they are often more like each other in topography, resources, political cultures, and much more, than they are to more distant states.
Thus, problems that affect one state also likely affect its neighbors. If a state takes the lead in experimenting with a solution, its neighbor is more likely to observe the successes and failures of that experiment and possibly also adopt the innovation.
Granted, states will not always converge on the same policy. Take fracking policy in New York and Pennsylvania, for example. Both have Marcellus Shale gas, but New York has banned fracking, whereas Pennsylvania is full speed ahead. Much of this can be chalked up to the differing political dynamics of the states.
This initial look to neighbor for policy solutions and coordination was evident during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as seemingly impromptu regional collaborations formed to coordinate policy responses. As I have written previously, some collaborations have roots in pre-pandemic cooperation on very different policy issues. For example, the origins of the early collaboration between New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania can be found in their fall 2019 efforts to work together on marijuana legalization.
But regional learning is not the whole story.
Policy successes and failures are not the only lessons that state legislators take from other states. They also look for political lessons.
Lee Hannah and I recently demonstrated what this looks like in the case of medical marijuana policy. While states have shared details with each other on things like packaging, safety, and more, advocates and legislative champions also adapted their framing of the beneficiaries of medical marijuana as the policy spreads to increasingly conservative states. Early (more liberal) states focused on how the policy would benefit HIV/AIDS, cancer, and glaucoma patients, whereas advocates in later campaigns have focused more on children with epilepsy and veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, both of which are more largely supported by conservatives.
Two of my studies provide some answers. Studying hundreds of policies adopted by states between 1960 and 2016, I found two important things.
First, while political learning has remained a constant across that period, regional policy learning has been on the decline. This means that ideological learning has become more important over time relative to geographic learning.
Second, regional policy learning is more likely early in the policy’s spread and political learning is more likely later. This suggests that earlier adopting states are working to solve a problem while states that trail along later become more concerned about being left behind their ideological peers.
There is circumstantial evidence of this from states’ responses to COVID-19. While regional networks were important for shutting down states, in some cases, and opening up states, in others, early in the crisis, measures like masks, stay at home orders, and K-12 school reopening have taken on an increasingly partisan divide. States fell back into old policy patterns instead of changing their prevailing policy regimes. While the virus may “know no political ideology,” in the words of California’s Governor Gavin Newsom, our political response to it does.
The landscape of state responses to COVID-19 in the face of a failure of federal leadership is still evolving. Just yesterday (August 4), it was announced that a bipartisan group of seven states partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation to develop a compact on COVID-19 testing. While bipartisan and not regional, the Republican Governors participating (Ohio and Massachusetts) are in states that have quietly pushed back against rhetoric from the White House that has downplayed the crisis.
There is still much to unpack about how states learn from each other, but social science research past and present, as well as the current coronavirus pandemic, is teaching us a lot.
