Governors in Control: Executive Orders, State-Local Preemption, and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Carol S Weissert, Matthew J Uttermark, Kenneth R Mackie and Alexandra Artiles

Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 2021, vol. 51, issue 3, 396-428

Abstract: The nation’s governors took strong and decisive action in responding to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, often directly affecting their local governments. These actions allow us to examine this question: Will governors’ actions in an unprecedented emergency situation centralize the authority of the state or rely on local governments to deal with localized problems? Additionally, what factors affect those decisions? We examine all governors’ executive orders affecting local governments in the first five months of the 2020 pandemic. We find that preemption did occur, especially in the early months of the pandemic. States that gave their localities more autonomy were associated with preemption throughout the pandemic; the governor’s party affiliation and her ideological match with local officials were associated with greater preemption in some phases of the pandemic but not others.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/publius/pjab013 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:publus:v:51:y:2021:i:3:p:396-428.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Publius: The Journal of Federalism is currently edited by Paul Nolette and Philip Rocco

More articles in Publius: The Journal of Federalism from CSF Associates Inc. Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().