Introduction to "Subnational COVID-19 Politics and Policy".

Abstract

This special section of JHPPL emerged as a response to a call for rigorous empirical analyses related to the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, both in the United States and from international and comparative perspectives. Many of the cross-nationally comparative submissions we received also employ subnational comparisons, and the three articles presented here are, in different ways, exemplars of the subnational turn in comparative politics research (Snyder 2001). All of these articles use subnational comparative analysis to examine policy making, implementation, and outcomes where it actually happens: at the local level, in subnational states or regions. One reason scholars may choose to examine subnational units is to generate a larger sample size from which to draw inferences, while also controlling for confounders attributable to the national-level context. But the focus on the subnational level in these pieces does not serve only to amplify the N. Subnational comparative research can do more, as these articles show. Each of these pieces also combats “methodological nationalism” (the tendency to, often mistakenly, view the nation-state as the natural unit of observation and analysis) by examining how attributes specific to substate rather than national-level units—for example, the degree or type of decentralization, the level of (in)dependence of subnational policy and political actors from the center, the local epidemiologic context—affect policies and outcomes. Paul F. Testa, Richard Snyder, Eva Rios, Eduardo Moncada, Agustina Giraudy, and Cyril Bennouna leverage the subnational variation in when government restrictions on movement were introduced to understand