COVID-19 and the Federal State

After almost two years through the pandemic, COVID-19 has proven to be a considerable and specific challenge for liberal states such as the Federal Republic of Germany. Its constitution requires state actors on all levels to take action to protect its citizens against risks entailed by infectious diseases, but also to respect the rule of law and fundamental rights, data protection legislation and institutional arrangements, particularly the relationship between the central level ("Bund”) and the states ("Länder”). As it turns out, this federalist structure does not provide for an adequate legal framework when it comes to global pandemics such as COVID-19. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Politics and the Public Health Workforce: Lessons Suggested from a Five-State Study.

Policy Points The United States public health system relies on an inadequate and inefficient mix of federal, state, and local funding. Various state-based initiatives suggest that a promising path to bipartisan support for increased public health funding is to gain the support of local elected officials by providing state (and federal) funding directly to local health departments, albeit with performance strings attached. Even with more funding, we will not solve the nation's public health workforce crisis until we make public health a more attractive career path with fewer bureaucratic barriers to entry. CONTEXT: The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the shortcomings of the United States public health system. High on the list is a public health workforce that is understaffed, underpaid, and undervalued. To rebuild that workforce, the American Rescue Plan (ARP) appropriated $7.66 billion to help create 100,000 new public health jobs. As part of this initiative, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) distributed roughly $2 billion to state, local, tribal, and territorial health agencies for use between July 1, 2021, and June 30, 2023. At the same time, several states have enacted (or are considering enacting) initiatives to increase state funding for their local health departments with the goal of ensuring that these departments can deliver a core set of services to all residents. The differences in approach between this first round of ARP funding and theseparate state initiatives offer an opportunity to compare, contrast, and suggest lessons learned. METHODS: After interviewing leaders at the CDC and other experts on the nation's public health workforce, we visited five states (Kentucky, Indiana, Mississippi, New York, and Washington) to examine, by means of interviews and documents, the implementation and impact of both the ARP workforce funds as well as the state-based initiatives. FINDINGS: Three themes emerged. First, states are not spending the CDC workforce funding in a timely fashion; although the specifics vary, there are several organizational, political, and bureaucratic obstacles. Second, the state-based initiatives follow different political paths but rely on the same overarching strategy: gain the support of local elected officials by providing funding directly to local health departments, albeit with performance strings attached. These state initiatives offer their federal counterparts a political roadmap toward a more robust model of public health funding. Third, even with increased funding, we will not meet the nation's public health workforce challenges until we make public health a more attractive career path (with higher pay, improved working conditions, and more training and promotion opportunities) with fewer bureaucratic barriers to entry (most importantly, with less reliance on outdated civil service rules). CONCLUSION: The politics of public health requires a closer look at the role played by county commissioners, mayors, and other local elected officials. We need a political strategy to persuade these officials that their constituents will benefit from a better public health system.

The fiscal sovereignty of the European Union after the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine

NextGenerationEU, the recovery programme adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic, did not provide the EU with fiscal sovereignty. Fiscal sovereignty remains under the control of the member states which are, however, constrained by the Stability and Growth Pact. Comparative federalism shows that central fiscal sovereignty requires granting the power to tax to the centre but without impairing the fiscal sovereignty of the units. The co-existence of two distinct, yet connected, fiscal sovereignties (EU and member states) would mean departing from the regulatory model of fiscal integration created with the Maastricht Treaty, and would thus require treaty change. Future research should perform a more thorough comparison between the EU and fiscally centralized and decentralized federations. Qualitative comparative analysis could complement process tracing and systematic content analysis to identify combinations of conditions that make the co-existence of fiscal sovereignties possible in consolidated federal polities – and still impossible in the EU. Books reviewed Paul Dermine (2022) The New Economic Governance of the Eurozone. A Rule of Law Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Federico Fabbrini (2022) EU Fiscal Capacity. Legal Integration After COVID-19 and the War in Ukraine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brady Gordon (2022) The Constitutional Boundaries of European Fiscal Federalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomasz P. Woźniakowski (2022) Fiscal Unions. Economic Integration in Europe and the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of European Integration is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

COVID-19, school closures, and remote teaching: The response time of Brazilian education systems.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, physical distancing strategies entered the list of recommended non)pharmaceutical measures to inhibit the spread of the virus. In educational institutions, these measures resulted in the suspension of face-to-face classes, a process known as school closures. However, states with less capacity to face the consequences of the pandemic ended up transfiguring this transitional measure into a permanent condition, exacerbating existing educational inequalities. This was the case in Brazil, which, during a crisis of the federal pact, triggered fragmented and uncoordinated remote teaching programs. It is precisely to Brazil that this article refers, which characterizes the response time to the closure of schools in the federal education network, in the form of the Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology (Institutos Federais de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia), in comparison with the state network. This is an exploratory and descriptive study that uses quantitative and qualitative methods, based on document analysis. It examines the interval between school closures, the disclosure of a contingency plan, the implementation of remote teaching, and the return to face-to-face activities. It finds that, on average, the Institutes took 114 days to publish a contingency plan, in contrast to 34 days for state networks. The article posits the hypothesis that such differences are related to the autonomy of the Institutes in relation to the federal government and the polarization that resulted from president Bolsonaro's administration, aggravated by his denialist stance. (English) [ FROM AUTHOR] El distanciamiento físico implementado para evitar la propagación de la covid-19 supuso la suspensión de las clases presenciales, o sea, el cierre de las escuelas. Estados con menor capacidad para enfrentar las consecuencias de la pandemia transformaron esa medida transitoria en permanente, lo cual exacerbó las desigualdades. Ese fue el caso de Brasil que, en medio de una crisis del pacto federativo, acudió a programas de enseñanza remota fragmentados y desordenados. En este artículo se compara el tiempo de respuesta ante el cierre de las escuelas de la red federal de educación –en la figura de los Institutos Federales de Educación, Ciencia y Tecnología– con el de la red estatal. El texto se basa en un estudio exploratorio y descriptivo fundamentado en métodos cuanti cualitativos y el análisis documental. Se analiza el tiempo entre el cierre de las unidades, la divulgación de un plan de contingencia, la implementación de la enseñanza remota y el regreso a las actividades presenciales. Se constata que, en promedio, los institutos federales tardaron 114 días para divulgar un plan de contingencia frente a los 34 días que requirieron las redes estatales. Se concluye con la siguiente hipótesis: las diferencias están relacionadas con la autonomía de los institutos respecto al Gobierno federal y la polarización que generó la gestión presidencial de Bolsonaro, empeorada con su postura negacionista. (Spanish) [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Íconos. Revista de Ciencias Sociales is the property of FLACSO Ecuador (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

BRAZILIAN SUPREME COURT AND FEDERALISM: BEFORE AND DURING THE PANDEMIC

This paper investigated how the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF) used to understand division of powers in federative matters before the covid-19 pandemic, which was mainly centralized and based on the nebulous criterion of the predominance of interests for federative conflicts resolution. Then, we conducted a data survey about the STF decisions on conflicts of competences between federated entities. The time cut was from March 2020 to January 2021. The judicial process cut, totaling 93 actions, occurred in the concentrated control actions, for having general and binding effects, and in the civil actions based on the primary competence of the Brazilian Supreme Court, which are intended to resolve federative conflicts. We concluded that the STF works was mostly decentralized since they adopted a renewed understanding about the right to health. This allowed greater autonomy for states and municipalities to define several topics. However, we noticed that the indeterminate principle of the predominance of interests was maintained as a defining criterion for federative conflicts, especially in matters relating to state laws that granted discounts on tuition from private educational institutions (ADIs 6,435, 6,423 and 6,575) and in state laws that allowed state public servants to suspend the payment of voluntary consignment (ADIs 6,484, 6,451 and 6,495). © 2023 Fundacao Getulio Vargas, Escola de Direito de Sao Paulo. All rights reserved.

State capacities and municipal education policies during the COVID-19 pandemic Capacidades estatales y pol?ticas municipales de educaci?n durante la pandemia de Covid-19

The development of pedagogical activities through remote teaching became common during the pandemic. Based on a survey carried out by the National Confederation of Municipalities, a set of heterogeneities was identified regarding the actions adopted in the area of education in Brazil. This study finds support in the concept of state capacities and aims to deepen the understanding of the factors that contributed to the increase of municipalities' capacity to respond to the crisis. A regression was performed considering a set of variables linked to the characteristics of the local governments. It was concluded that variables related to technical-administrative and political-relational capacities related to the existence of participatory channels were fundamental in this process.

Mexican Fiscal Federalism confronted to the Covid-19 vaccination strategy in the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico

The article analyzes the relationship between the population and the positive cases of coronavirus in the population aged 60 years and over to develop a priority vaccination strategy in the municipalities and mayors of the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico, 2021. Fiscal federalism is used to discuss the decentralization of competencies in government orders. The metropolitan scale is studied where the hegemony of the federal government over services is presented, in this case in relation to the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine. The methodology considers the positive cases in the population over 60, the quantile technique is used as a basis for the analysis of spatial correlation, concluding that the vaccination process had to have been different.

Federalism and pandemic policies: variety as the spice of life.

In the ordinary course of life, choices vary with age and other factors because one's opportunities vary with one's circumstances. Thus, investments in and expenditures on healthcare (and most other things) vary with age and a variety of other factors, including whether one lives in a rural area, suburb, or central city, health risks, risk aversion, and beliefs about the nature of a good life. Because assessment of the effects of illnesses vary with the same factors, the conclusions reached about best private and governmental health policies also tend to vary. This implies that conformity to "ideal" pandemic policies is more likely to be generated by a federal or polycentric system of policy making than a unitary system, especially ones that are constrained by a generality principle.

Vaccine hesitancy and respect for public health measures: Citizens' trust in politicians and public servants across national, subnational and municipal levels of government.

Research shows that citizens' trust in government is associated with lower vaccine hesitancy and an increased willingness to follow public health measures. Thus far, however, the population health literature has largely conceptualized "government" as a unitary actor. This article furthers our understanding of this relationship by examining two important features of modern governance that have largely gone unexamined: (1) that governing involves popularly elected politicians and appointed bureaucrats; and (2), that governing often comprises many levels of government within the same country. Analyzing survey data from Canada with various multivariate regression models, this article finds that the relationship political trust has with vaccine hesitancy and intention to follow for public health measures is more complex than presently recognized. Specifically, a larger change in citizens' public health behaviors is associated with trust in public health officials than with trust in government, and of particular importance is trust in national public health authorities, despite the fact that public health measures in Canada are largely the jurisdiction of subnational governments. The implications of these findings for population health research and policymakers are discussed.

The strength of a weak centre: pandemic politics in the European Union and the United States

The European Union presents a puzzle to political systems scholars: how can a developing polity, with all its attendant functional weaknesses, be rendered politically stable even through moments of a policy crisis? Building on insights from the literature on fiscal federalism, this article challenges much conventional wisdom on Europe's incompleteness. This is based on the corollary of Jonathan Rodden's concept of Hamilton's Paradox: whereas a strong centre cannot resist exploitation by states because it has the means to rescue them, a weak centre's lack of exploitable capacity may induce states to support, and even empower, it in a crisis. This article argues that in providing a contemporaneous stress-test, Covid-19 serves to expose both the pathologies of a strong-centred federation and the surprising resilience of a weak one. It highlights three polity features—powers, decision-making modes and integrity—and charts their political implications during an acute crisis. The article argues that in the EU these features incentivise cooperative ‘polity maintenance' between polarised states, a feature absent in an American polity marked by rivalry between polarised parties. The article thus challenges notions that the EU's incompleteness necessarily leads it to dysfunction or that it should strive to emulate established federations. © 2023, The Author(s).

Multilevel governance and political leadership: crisis communication in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom during the COVID-19 pandemic

Consistency in crisis communication is a key aspect of effective political leadership during crises, but can be difficult in multilevel systems due to the number of leaders and fragmentation of policymaking powers. The literature on multilevel governance suggests that centralisation enhances consistency in crisis communication while decentralisation leads to inconsistency. Consistency in crisis communication is also expected to depend on whether leaders coordinate crisis management. Comparing crisis communication in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper shows that centralisation does not automatically lead to consistent crisis communication. At the same time, decentralised decision making does not necessarily undermine consistency. Overall, crisis communication tends to be more consistent when leaders coordinate crisis management. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of European Public Policy is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Coronavirus and pandemics in light of political-institutional systems or political-institutional systems in light of the coronavirus

Taking Germany as an example, this chapter investigates some principle challenges a federalist system faces. While these are mostly not relevant or even not recognized during uneventful times of policy making, it is shown that they become points of potential crisis of the polity when facing unforeseen and unknown challenges like the COVID pandemic. © 2023 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Underpromise and Overdeliver: The Failure of Political Rhetoric in Managing COVID-19 in Australia

From a ‘lucky country' on the edge of the world, Australia and its governments felt they had weathered the pandemic storm in October 2020. But, the insular approach to combatting COVID-19 cracked in the months since. A series of critical failures in government response has been identified. These include vaccine procurement and roll-out, ‘gold standard' contact tracing that turned out abysmal failures, debilitating border closures and an inability to coordinate policy and governance responses to Delta and Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2. The liberal federal government architecture cracked—some commentators repeatedly use ‘bungled'—under the pressures in this next chapter in Australia's pandemic response. In this chapter, we do not only describe the deficiencies in the federal and state governments' capacity to plan strategically and coordinate between data and intervention, we also show that the resilience of communities is essential in responding to crises—but to grow and thrive, proactive government policies will still be required. © TheEditor(s) (ifapplicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, 2022.

Fiscal decentralization in Poland: 2004-2019 municipal and city dataset.

This dataset covers 2476-2479 Polish municipalities and cities (dependent on the year) over a period from 2004 when Poland joined the EU to the pre-COVID-19-pandemic 2019. The created 113 yearly panel variables include budgetary, electoral competitiveness, and European Union funded investment drive data. While the dataset has been created out of publicly available sources, their use requires advanced knowledge of budgetary data and their classification, as well as data gathering, merging, and clearing, which required many hours of work over a year. Fiscal variables were created out of raw data of over 25 million subcentral governments records. They were sourced from Rb27s (revenue), Rb28s (expenditure), RbNDS (balance), and RbZtd (debt) forms, which are reported quarterly by all subcentral governments to the Ministry of Finance. These data were aggregated according to the governmental budgetary classification keys into ready-to-use variables. Furthermore, these data were used to create original EU-financed local investment drives proxy variables based on large investments in general and in sports objects in particular. Moreover, subcentral electoral data from 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2018 were sourced from the National Electoral Commission, mapped, cleared, merged, and used to create original electoral competitiveness variables. This dataset can be used to model different aspects of fiscal decentralization, political budget cycles, and EU-funded investment in a large sample of local government units.

Enhancing Federal Revenue under the American Rescue Plan Act: An Opportunity to Bolster State Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services Programs.

The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) includes a one-year 10 percentage point increase in the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage for Medicaid-funded home and community-based services (HCBS). The goal is to strengthen state efforts to help older adults and people with disabilities live safely in their homes and communities rather than in institutional settings during the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay provides a detailed description and analysis of this provision, including issues state governments need to consider when expending the additional federal revenue provided. It also draws lessons from the Affordable Care Act's Balancing Incentive Program to suggest insights for the potential of ARPA to promote further growth in Medicaid HCBS programs. It argues that key to success will be consultation with community stakeholders under the auspices of clear and frequent federal guidance and the development of concrete plans with which to expend the additional revenues in the most effective way possible in the limited time frame provided. The essay concludes by highlighting the importance of instituting strategies and processes for maximizing enhanced federal matching funds under ARPA in preparation for subsequent availability of substantial additional federal resources targeting Medicaid HCBS under other proposed initiatives.

Decentralization: A handicap in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic? The response of the regional governments in Spain.

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided an ultimate testing ground for evaluating the resilience and effectiveness of federal and decentralized systems. The article analyses how the Spanish asymmetrical system of decentralization has responded to the pandemic, focusing on the management developed by the sub-central governments (Autonomous Communities) during the first two waves of the pandemic in 2020. The research, which is both quantitative and qualitative, employs multidisciplinary tools and information sources, analyzing and linking fiscal and budgetary sources with the available statistics and information on health. Although the health, economic and social crisis caused by COVID-19 has highlighted appreciable shortcomings related to the decentralized model of territorial organization - in questions of both regional financing and health management - the research concludes that decentralization has not per se been a handicap when confronting the pandemic in Spain.

COVID-19 and the Culture of American Federalism

COVID-19 highlighted America's federalist structure as the dissemination of pandemic information was frequently left to states and localities. For some citizens, this was a welcome relief from national-level policymaking and political narratives, though others argued that the federal government was failing to live up to its obligations. We identify three reasons for variation in Americans' trust in information from different levels of government: partisanship, ideology, and state identity. Using data from a representative online survey of more than one thousand people, we demonstrate that each individual characteristic shaped respondents' trust in leaders to provide pandemic information. Partisanship and ideology played major roles in information trust at both the national and state level, but individuals' psychological attachment to their state and to the nation also shaped their trust in the federated information environment.

La crise des finances publiques au Brésil et le cas du Covid

Cet article analyse la crise des finances publiques au Brésil qui persiste depuis 2013 et est aggravée par les effets de la Covid. Malgré les contraintes budgétaires imposées par le cadre constitutionnel, le Gouvernement fédéral a déployé des moyens importants vers les entités fédérées pour faire face à la pandémie. Un régime financier d'urgence a visé à contrecarrer la pénurie, le chômage et les effets du confinement. Le pacte fédératif en ressort renforcé, sachant qu'une décision de la Cour suprême a rappelé que les organes fédérés et les municipalités ont une compétence concurrente en matière sanitaire, ce qui dilue politiquement le pouvoir fédéral.Alternate abstract: This article analyses the public finances crisis in Brazil, which lingers since 2013 and is worsened by the effects of Covid-19. In spite of the budgetary constraints imposed by the Constitution, the federal Government has deployed substantial resources towards the federated entities to tackle the pandemic. An emergency financial mechanism was aimed to counteract shortage, unemployment and lock down consequences. The federative pact was consequently strengthened, knowing that a ruling of the Supreme Court recalled that federated bodies and municipalities have a concurrent jurisdiction on health matters, which weakens the political influence of the federal power.

A Final Report Card on the States' Response to COVID-191

Two and a half years ago COVID-19 spread to the United States. Following the federalism model (New State Ice Co. vs Liebmann;Cheng and Lee 2019), the 50 states and their governors and legislators made many of their own pandemic policy choices to mitigate the damage from the virus. States learned from one another over time about what policies worked most and least effectively in terms of containing the virus while minimizing the negative effects of lockdown strategies on businesses and children. This study is an expanded and updated version of an October 2020 report card of how pandemic health, economy, and policy varied across the 50 states and the District of Columbia (Committee to Unleash Prosperity 2020). It examines three variables: health outcomes, economic performance throughout the pandemic, and impact on education. We find no relationship between reduced economic activity during the pandemic and mortality. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.