This article compares and constrasts the responses of Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United States to the COVID-19 outbreak and spread. The pandemic has posed special challenges to these federal systems. Although federal systems typically have many advantages—they can adapt policies to local conditions, for example, and experiment with different solutions to problems—pandemics and people cross regional borders, and controlling contagion requires a great deal of national coordination and intergovernmental cooperation. The four federal systems vary in their relative distribution of powers between regional and national governments, in the way that health care is administered, and in the variation in policies across regions. We focus on the early responses to COVID-19, from January through early May 2020. Three of these countries—Australia, Canada, and Germany—have done well in the crisis. They have acted quickly, done extensive testing and contact tracing, and had a relatively uniform set of policies across the country. The United States, in contrast, has had a disastrous response, wasting months at the start of the virus outbreak, with limited testing, poor intergovernmental cooperation, and widely divergent policies across the states and even within some states. The article seeks to explain both the relative uniform responses of these three very different federal systems, and the sharply divergent response of the United States.
Federalism in a Time of Plague: How Federal Systems Cope With Pandemic