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

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

Although we also coded implementation dates for each of these policies, our focus is on the dates policies were announced, for two reasons. First, we expect much of the effect of these emergency measures on social behavior to be immediate. The state's power to compel socially responsible behavior is often said to act through "quasi-voluntary compliance," in which most citizens choose pro-social behaviors given a cue from the state that is backed with the threat of sanction. (21) This effect should be all the stronger to the extent people treat costly social distancing measures as a credible signal of the viral threat. Second, our focus is on predicting the timing of governor's actions, which naturally points to announcement dates, rather than implementation dates which may be delayed (in the case of school closures, for example), by weekends and spring breaks. Figure 1 displays the timing of different states' adoptions of these five social distancing policies over the four-week study period. No state acted before 10 March, a full thirteen days after the first report of community transmission, yet by 15 March, uptake was rapid across states. In general, states typically started social distancing through recommendations or restrictions on public gatherings, then turned to restrictions on schools 2 We include recommendations in this category for two reasons: first, this was often the first action states took, and early actors did not always revisit these policies with a restrictive mandate; second, the target of these measures was typically large events that would be unlikely to maintain viable attendance under the cloud of a state recommendation to cancel events.