Contagious COVID-19 Policies: Policy Diffusion During Times of Crisis

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis has demanded rapid, widespread policy action. In response, nations turned to social distancing policies to reduce the spread of the virus. These policies were implemented globally, proving as contagious as the virus they are meant to prevent. Yet variation in their implementation invites questions as to how and why countries adopt social distancing policies, and whether the causal mechanisms driving these policy adoptions are based on internal resources and problem conditions or other external factors such as conditions in other countries. We leverage daily changes in international social distancing policies to understand the impacts of problem characteristics, institutional and economic context, and peer effects on social distancing policy adoption. Using fixed-effects models on an international panel of daily data from 2020, we find that peer effects, particularly mimicry of geographic neighbors, political peers, and language agnates drive policy diffusion and shape countries’ policy choices.

Keywords: COVID, COVID-19, Coronavirus, Policy Diffusion, Public Policy, Emulation, Policy Mimicry, Peer Effects