Why We Need Integrative Analytical Frameworks: The Relevance of Policy Diffusion during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Due to the significant political, economic, and social implications of the COVID-19 pandemic and its containment measures, there has been huge scientific interest in government responses. Thorough analyses of timing and nature of crisis policy are essential to draw appropriate lessons from the pandemic. However, comparative research explaining government reactions generally exhibits a division between the analysis of domestic determinants and the analysis of policy diffusion that mirrors broader policy research. Diffusion theorists commonly argue that the policy decisions of one country are significantly shaped by the choices of others due to interdependence, learning, or emulation, while conventional accounts of policy decisions refer only to national conditions. The challenges arising in the light of such analytical division, which extends well beyond the context of pandemic scholarship, are twofold: Conceptually, it is imperative to better understand the relative weight of peer influence and independent problem-solving as different countries respond to a shared policy problem. Methodologically, the failure to include variables from both perspectives can lead to omitted variable bias and thus unreliable results when estimating direct effects. This paper therefore argues that the development and well-considered operationalization of integrative analytical frameworks is crucial to identify the key drivers of policy decisions. Primarily, any satisfactory explanation of governmental behaviour in an increasingly interdependent and complex world must account for both domestic and diffusion factors. Rather than simply estimating the additive effects of such individual parameters, this requires theorizing on the relationships between variables and how they influence specific outcomes. Moreover, the outcome of the empirical analysis based on the developed framework may depend on the operationalization of the variables included, which is particularly challenging when there is a lack of clear theoretical underpinning for a particular measurement. Empirically, the study compares the timing of national lockdown measures during the COVID-19 pandemic in OECD member states, employing survival analysis on OxCGRT data in combination with socio-economic and contextual data to model the days between the first COVID-19 case and the policy response in each country. First, the effects of combining the two research perspectives of national and diffusion factors are examined. Second, it is shown how different operationalizations of key variables such as problem pressure influence these results. The paper makes two substantial contributions to the literature. More generally, it illustrates a key conceptual and methodological challenge of policy research by discussing the importance of integrating mechanisms of policy diffusion in all comparative research rather than addressing them in isolation. More narrowly, it encourages researchers in the field of COVID-19 policy to conscientiously rethink the operationalization of their analytical frameworks. Overall, this paper not only enhances our understanding of the determinants of governments' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic but discusses common challenges that arise in comparative policy research.