State Capacity and COVID-19 Responses: Comparing the US States

This article addresses the interstate differences in outcomes from the coronavirus disease COVID-19 pandemic by focusing on state capacity. State capacity refers to states’ ability to create and implement policy. We posit that states want to limit death and destruction within their borders. COVID-19 created an instance in which states had a shared, preferred outcome but had very different levels of success. Using a novel measure of state capacity that allows for subnational comparisons – and is independent of ideological political will – we show that states with greater capacity experienced fewer excess deaths during 2020 and more successfully distributed vaccines in early 2021. The findings are robust to various measures of partisanship, social capital, geography, and demographics. Our work bridges US state politics literature and comparative politics literature on state capacity, and it contributes to research on the politics of pandemics.