The political economy of early COVID-19 interventions in US states

Abstract

We investigate how politico-economic factors shaped government responses to the spread of COVID-19. Our simple framework uses epidemiological, economic and politico-economic arguments. Confronting the theory with US state level data we find strong evidence for partisanship even when we control for fundamentals including the electorate's political views. Moreover, we detect an important role for the proximity of elections which we interpret as indicative of career concerns. Finally, we find suggestive evidence for complementarities between voluntary activity reductions and government imposed restrictions.

Keywords: COVID-19; Lockdown; Politics.

Fig. 1

Start and end dates for lockdowns across US states.

Fig. 2

Severity of restrictions across states during their lockdowns.

Fig. 3

Stringency of restrictions across states.

Fig. 4

Duration and stringency of restrictions are strongly correlated.

Fig. 5

Dynamics in the canonical (blue) and modified (red) SIR models: $x\left(t\right)$ (dotted), $y\left(t\right)$ (solid), and $z\left(t\right)$ (dashed). (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)