Policy Error and Policy Rescue in COVID-19 Responses in the United States and United Kingdom

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic represents an existential threat to societies around the world. There has been considerable variation in both rhetoric and policy responses among the many national governments. This piece explains how democratic institutions, in particular federalism, can impact the speed and degree of policy responses protecting citizens, even when national leaders share similar public rhetoric that is non-conducive to speedy policy response. Comparing the policies of United States and United Kingdom with the backdrop of their national leaders’ public stances, we argue that having multiple decision points due to the redundancy inherent in federalism increases the chances that a citizen will receive the “correct” policy, even when policy-makers at some levels of government put forth “wrong” policy responses. However, in unitary government, society must rely on the central leader to determine the “correct” policy as sub-national policy-makers are constrained by institutions in their ability to respond. That, due to inherent error probability, delays policy response

CONSTITUTIONAL AND INSTITUTIONAL STRUCTURAL DETERMINANTS OF POLICY RESPONSIVENESS TO PROTECT CITIZENS FROM EXISTENTIAL THREATS: COVID-19 AND BEYOND

A multitude of government forms and institutional variations have the same aims of serving their countries and citizens but vary in outcomes. What it means to best serve the citizens is, however, a matter of broad interpretation and so the disagreements persist. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic creates new metrics for comparing government performance – the metrics of human deaths, or, alternatively and as we pursue it here, the metrics of the speed of government response in preventing human deaths through policy adoption. We argue in this essay that institutional and government systems with more authority redundancies are more likely to rapidly generate policy in response to crisis and find better policy solutions compared to centralized systems with minimal authority redundancies. This is due to a multiplicity of access points to policy making, which increase the chances of a policymaker crafting the “correct” response to crisis, which can be replicated elsewhere. Furthermore, citizens in centralized and unitary governments must rely on national policymakers to get the correct response as subnational policymakers are highly constrained compared to their counterparts in decentralized systems. As policy authority is institutionally defined, these policy authority redundancies correspond to specific institutional and constitutional forms. In this paper, we provide a mathematical/formal model where we specifically analyze the contrast in the speed of policy response between more centralized and autocratic states versus democratic federations