The COVID-19 pandemic has upended every aspect of American life. State governments responded quickly to protect public health and stabilize overwhelmed hospital systems. The most restrictive policy, the stay-at-home order, was seen by public health officials as a cornerstone of successful state mitigation strategies. But like many aspects of contemporary politics, support for these efforts took on a distinctly partisan hue. In this paper, I argue that party politics significantly affected state policy responses to COVID-19, which in turn limited mitigation efforts. To this point, I first demonstrate that Democratic governors were faster and more likely to adopt stay-at-home orders than Republicans. Next, using a synthetic control approach, I show that these orders caused residents to practice greater social distancing. Finally, I find that greater social distancing worked to “flattened the curve” by limiting the growth of COVID-19 cases. Together these findings show how party politics affected state pandemic responses and have important long-term implications as states begin lifting restrictions.

Public mask use has emerged as a key tool in response to COVID-19. We develop a classification of statewide mask mandates that reveals variation in their scope and timing. Some US states quickly mandated wearing of face coverings in most public spaces, whereas others issued narrow mandates or no mandate at all. We consider how differences in COVID-19 epidemiological indicators and partisan politics affect when states adopted broad mask mandates, starting with the earliest mandates in April 2020 and continuing through the end of 2020. The most important predictor is the presence of a Republican governor, delaying statewide indoor mask mandates an estimated 98.0 days on average. COVID-19 indicators such as confirmed case or death rates are much less important predictors. This finding highlights a key challenge to public efforts to increase mask wearing, one of the most effective tools for preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 while restoring economic activity.

While many scholars and analysts have observed a decline in civility in recent years, there have been few examinations of how political, economic, and institutional structures may partially explain inter-state differences in these trends. We suggest three potential explanations: (1) institutional structures, such as legislative professionalism and gubernatorial power, have created different contexts in which legislators build and maintain inter-personal relationships; (2) partisan competition has led to less bipartisan cooperation and contributed to strained relationships between members of different parties; and, (3) economic inequity and change has contributed to economic anxiety among citizens, contributing to conflict in legislative bodies as elected officials attempt to navigate emerging policy challenges. To test these explanations, we develop an innovative measure of civility using a national survey of lobbyists and a partial Multilevel Regression and Poststratification (MRP) design. Findings suggest that there is some validity to all three explanations, and signifying that civility is at least partially a result of structural issues.

We use the case of education interest groups to examine how and when policy changes lead interest groups to polarize in their support for political parties. Using over 145,000 campaign contributions from all 50 states from 2000 to 2017, we test whether the passage of private school choice, charter laws, and labor retrenchment policies led to the polarization of education interest groups over time. In 2000, teachers unions were the dominant group and mostly aligned with Democrats. Meanwhile, Republicans lacked support from any education groups. This pattern was consistent across states. Over time, coalitions in some states became polarized, meaning unions grew even more aligned with Democrats and reform groups with Republicans, while other states did not experience such polarization. We show that private school choice programs, but not labor retrenchment or charter laws, contributed to this changing partisan alignment. Our findings demonstrate that policy feedback can shape both the electoral mobilization and party alignments of interest groups.

State governments, often described as “laboratories of democracy,” design and implement many public policies, but this moniker also implies course correction when initial efforts fail. But how do states learn from failure? Existing hypotheses about policy learning and broad research capacity are insufficient. Using case studies of failed juvenile justice policies in Texas and Washington, I explore when failure acknowledgment occurs at all. I argue that a state’s bureaucratic capacity to gather data—distinct from its analytical capacity—is necessary for public officials to acknowledge failure, highlighting the impact of policy and institutional design on evidence-based policy making and policy corrections.