Uncoordinated federalism: Subnational response to the pandemic crisis in Mexico

Abstract

AbstractThe COVID‐19 pandemic has demanded prompt actions from governments all over the world. In both developed and developing countries, national governments have had to make unprecedented decisions to face the extraordinary challenges posed by the pandemic. In this paper, we explore how, due to the limited intervention from the Mexican federal government (in terms of policy actions, funding mechanisms and acting as a coordinating agent), state governments stepped up to respond to the pandemic. We argue that Mexico's response was relatively decentralized and substantially shaped by individual subnational governments. Based on a new dataset of over 600 subnational governments' responses to the social and economic effects of the pandemic, we show that state governments decided to react to the pandemic with their own policy measures, responding locally to pressing concerns. Furthermore, we demonstrate that state government responses varied widely in their scope and ambition, which exacerbated the pandemic's uneven national effects. We further contend that the structural constraints of Mexico's federalism have had an impact on these reactions, as social policy responsibilities at the state and local levels have historically been opaque and fragmented and state governments lack the funding necessary to implement sufficient and innovative initiatives.