Publications

This paper analyzes intergovernmental task sharing in combating the COVID-19 pandemic by focusing on the practices of the two largest African countries—Nigeria and South Africa. Nigeria is a constitutional federation; South Africa is a unitary country where the constitution delegates some public policies to subnational governments. Whether regional and national politicians were willing to collaborate during the pandemic depended on their calculus of the benefits and costs of sharing the political risks and the blame for imposing restrictive measures across jurisdictions. In Nigeria, federal authorities preferred to avoid risks, and subnational politicians became the primary actors who implemented restrictive policies and, thus, accepted the risks and blame. In South Africa, national authorities almost entirely took over the responsibility for pandemic policies. This paper argues that the partisan elite linkage, the saliency of federal politics at the subnational level, and the constitutional design framing the nexus of the regional- and national-level politics all mattered by creating distinctive incentives for politicians to take restrictive pandemic measures.

We have developed and made accessible for multidisciplinary audiences a unique global dataset of the behavior of political actors during the COVID-19 pandemic as measured by their policy-making efforts to protect the public. The dataset presents consistently coded cross-national data at subnational and national levels on the daily level of stringency of public health policies by level of government overall and within specific policy categories and reports branches of government that adopted these policies. The data on these public mandates of protective behaviors is collected from media announcements and government publications. The dataset allows comparisons of governments’ policy efforts and timing worldwide and can provide information on policy determinants of pandemic outcomes–both societal and possibly medical.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented challenges, prompting policymakers to navigate complex trade-offs between safeguarding public health and upholding civil liberties. This chapter examines how political systems influenced policy responses during the pandemic, focusing on South Africa, Somalia, and Zimbabwe. Drawing on existing literature and empirical data, we explore the impact of political constraints on COVID-19 policy outcomes, comparing the effectiveness of measures implemented in democratic and authoritarian contexts. Our analysis reveals distinct patterns: while South Africa exhibited stricter precautions, political dynamics in Somalia and Zimbabwe allowed for more aggressive measures despite lower policy effectiveness. We attribute these variations to political accountability, media freedom, and judicial independence differences. Our findings highlight the critical role of political constraints in

In this essay, we establish with a global sample that policy production of Non-Medical Interventions (masking, lockdowns, school closures, etc.) during the COVID-19 pandemic was not efficient. Furthermore, we theorize that one cause of such inefficiency was the Tragedy of the Commons situation among the political incumbents at national and sub-national levels over issuing these politically risky measures. This theoretical argument finds empirical support with global policy origins data in the COVID-19 Protective Policy Index dataset.

Even though crisis management is a local public good, the limited resource capacity of local governments forces federal authorities to step into state-level policy-making, which requires strong inter-governmental cooperation during crisis management. However, this policy necessity does not mean that elected policy authorities from state and federal units are eager to collaborate because their electoral incentives may diversify, which may cause policy interruption at the state level. This paper argues that the level of integrated party system influences incumbents’ electoral incentives, which they use to set their policy preferences. Specifically, error-creator party systems, represented by an increase in the electoral power of regional parties at the sub-national unit, disrupt the policy linkage between federal and state incumbents, creating policy inefficiencies regarding policy authorities’ decisiveness during the crisis. Conversely, error-solver party systems, also called integrated party systems, minimize electoral inefficiencies among government units and encourage them to collaborate. A novel dataset construes this argument, the Public Health Protective Policy Index (PPI), produced by the Binghamton University Covid Lab. The dataset focuses on intergovernmental collaboration during the pre-vaccine period of the pandemic in 11 federal countries. Results pointed out that as error creators, regional parties disrupt the linkage between federal and sub-national political authorities, causing policy inefficiencies at the sub-national level of crisis management during the pandemic.