# State Capacity and COVID-19 Responses: Comparing the U.S. States

Status: published
Visibility: public-pdf
Authors: with Kiran Auerbach and Hannah M. Ridge
Venue: State Politics & Policy Quarterly
Year: 2024
DOI: 10.1017/spq.2024.11
Canonical URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/spq.2024.11

## Summary

A new subnational measure of state capacity is used to explain why some states handled the pandemic better than others. Higher-capacity states had fewer excess deaths in 2020 and distributed vaccines more effectively in early 2021, even after accounting for partisanship, demographics, geography, and social capital. Anti-COVID policies also worked best where states had enough administrative capacity to actually enforce them.

## Public Files

- Metadata: https://jyl19.github.io/papers/state-capacity-and-covid-19-responses-comparing-the-u-s-states/metadata.json
- PDF: https://jyl19.github.io/papers/state-capacity-and-covid-19-responses-comparing-the-u-s-states/paper.pdf