Developing a Quantitative Framework to Track and Assess State-Level Policy Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic

State governments play a vital role during the COVID-19 pandemic, yet our quantitative approaches to track and assess state-level policy responses at scale remain limited. Here we propose to develop a comprehensive data-driven framework that links novel large-scale datasets across rather disparate domains spanning policy, science, and epidemiology, allowing us to systematically evaluate state-level policy responses to the pandemic, and beyond. Building our preliminary work which was published in Science, we aim to use and develop new tools from the science of science, network science, and computational social science to (1) analyze COVID-19 policy documents across the US to assess state-level policy responses to the pandemic across various policy targets; (2) develop and apply a network-based framework to track the interactions among policy-making institutions across the policy frontier of COVID-19, as well as their connections to other policy institutions (federal agencies, think tanks and intergovernmental organizations), scientific research as well as mainstream media; and (3) develop a multidimensional evaluation of state-level policy outcomes and assess their relationship with policy responses tracked in (1) and (2). Together, the proposed project will make several key contributions. (1) By integrating and analyzing these diverse data sources for the first time, this project will develop a new quantitative framework with the potential to offer highly differentiating insights to inform effective policy responses. (2) The project will create a real-time dashboard that tracks state-level policy response for researchers, policy makers, and the general public. (3) The data and methodologies developed are not limited to analyzing COVID-19 policy and can be easily extended to a general quantitative framework to track other policy responses and the enormously important outcomes they govern.