Open AccessState-level Citizen Response to COVID-19 Containment Measures in Brazil and Mexico
Author(s) -
Claire Dunn,
Isabel Laterzo
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of politics in latin america
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.327
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1868-4890
pISSN - 1866-802X
DOI - 10.1177/1866802x211057135
Subject(s) - political science , social distance , state (computer science) , variation (astronomy) , compliance (psychology) , public policy , public health , public administration , covid-19 , development economics , political economy , sociology , social psychology , law , economics , psychology , disease , medicine , physics , nursing , pathology , algorithm , computer science , astrophysics , infectious disease (medical specialty)
In Brazil and Mexico, presidents failed to take swift, national action to stop the spread of COVID-19. Instead, the burden of imposing and enforcing public health measures has largely fallen to subnational leaders, resulting in varied approaches within each country and conflicting messaging from elites. We likewise see variation in compliance with social distancing across subnational units. To explain this variation, we contend that citizen responses are driven both by the comprehensiveness of state policies and whether they take cues from national or subnational elites. We hypothesize that support for national and subnational elites, and the nature of the state-level policy response, affect citizen compliance with public health guidelines. In both countries, we find that support for the governor has an interactive relationship with policy response. In Brazil, support for the president is associated with lower compliance. In Mexico, this effect is not present. We argue that these distinct relationships are due to the different cues emerging from each leader.