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

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

Neighboring state actions increase the likelihood of social distancing policy. As in other policy areas, governors may look to their peers to determine appropriate action. The policy diffusion literature suggests different ways to determine each state's "peer group." Because the coronavirus spreads spatially, we focus on actions by neighboring states, and estimate the likelihood a state will implement a specific kind of social distancing as a function of the percentage of contiguous states also mandating that policy. We find that a state with no neighbors adopting a given policy was 32.0% (95% CI: 8.4 to 50.8) less likely to adopt it than a state with 50% or more of its neighbors adopting that policy. This corresponds to a delay of 1.20 days (95% CI: 1.13 to 1.26). Investigation of other possible mechanisms -including policy diffusion based on the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in neighboring states or based on the actions of peers a given state typically looks to for policy innovations -failed to uncover additional patterns of diffusion. We speculate that actions by neighboring states may grant cover to governors to take similar actions.(28)