Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

Spring 5-10-2024

Keywords

Border Closures, School Closures, State of Emergency, Institutional Change, Decentralization, Pandemic Decision-Making, Covid-19 Policy, Subnational Governance

Abstract

The COVID-19 Pandemic saw dramatic global shifts in legislative powers between central and local governments. With changes in the severity and duration of the pandemic, in the federations of Nigeria, Australia, and Canada, policymaking regarding border and school closures and states of emergency saw an increasing involvement of regional governments. We suggest that looking at the national and regional PPI data for our hypotheses could indicate directly the severity of the pandemic in these nations. Federalisms particularly provide a case of institutional change evidencing that COVID-era decision-making saw a change in the rules and expectations of governance in the nations we analyze. Emergency powers that would have generally fallen upon national governments were instead adopted by provincial bodies, the alternative spheres of policy creation that mark federalism as a political system, because of inactivity at the national level.

Publisher Attribution

Open Repository Binghamton

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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