Pandemic Politics: Timing State-Level Social Distancing Responses to COVID-19

Christopher Adolph; Kenya Amano; Bree Bang-Jensen; Nancy Fullman; John Wilkerson

We review the determinants of delays in state-level COVID-19 social distancing measures in order of substantive impact, quantifying the impact of each factor in two ways. First, we show the degree to which each factor -such as governors' partisanship, the presence of Trump voters, or actions by neighboring states -reduces the chance a state acts to impose a new social distancing mandate on a given date (Figure 2 ; see Appendix for tabular results). This is the well-known hazard ratio, a common summary of event history models. Second, we use our estimated model to simulate the average delay each factor would cause if it were present in each state. That is, we might ask: if every state had a Republican governor, how many days later would they have implemented each social distancing measure than if every state had a Democratic governor. This is known 10 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a display the preprint in perpetuity.