Compliance With National COVID-19 responses and measures (CoWiNaCo)

This research proposal answers the Special Call on Coronaviruses that the SNF has opened on March 4, 2020. With the ongoing crisis, all states have taken measures to mitigate further spread of the disease. A major concern in the public, political and expert debates on these national responses is the question of compliance: Does, to what extent and why the population comply with crisis directives, including the mobility restrictions such as social distancing or confinement? This question is of utmost importance as counter measures against COVID-19 can only be effective if target populations indeed follows the instructions and abides by the rules.This question is at the core of the field of compliance research in public policy studies and refers to two major compliance subjects: the implementing sub-national units (such as the Swiss cantons) and the target populations that in the COVID-19 case is identical with all inhabitants of a country. We propose to study the factors leading both to compliance and to noncompliance with COVID-19 counter measures by comparing Switzerland, Israel and the USA. The research design consists of a qualitative case study design with two sets of comparisons: First, we test the member state compliance hypotheses in the USA and in Switzerland with Israel as contrasting control case; and second, we test the citizen compliance working hypotheses in all three countries, focusing on the comparison between Switzerland and Israel with USA as contrasting control case.The selection of three countries follows an adapted compound research design with contrasting least likely cases: Switzerland and USA are comparable as both are highly decentralized federal states with extensive subnational member state autonomy. This means that subnational member states can change, customize, gold-plate or even compensate central government policy in order to adjust it to their needs. However, it also means that public policy is scattered and fragmented in such systems. Subnational member states in this study therefore always refer to either the Swiss cantons or the American states. Israel is a centralized system and thus serves as the contrasting case. Switzerland and Israel then are comparable as both are about the same size. The USA is the contrast case. Moreover, the three countries responded to the crisis differently in terms of when measures started and in terms of the severity of the measures taken. We use the two comparative settings to better understand citizen compliance and noncompliance: who complies and who does not? Why? What are the drivers of compliance, what hinders compliance, and what contributes to noncompliance?We expect to find relevant insights in answering the following questions: -First, what factors foster citizen compliance with drastic measures and what factors hinder it or encourage noncompliance?-Second, how can we foster subnational member state compliance in order to achieve a coherent policy response in federalized systems. Alternatively, in the case of government failure at the central state level, how can we achieve coherent and adequate policy responses at the subnational member state level in times of crisis?The project responds to the following priority areas of the call:-The societal impact at large [...]; -Impact of official and social media communications on [the] behavior of policy makers, health care workers, patients and populations; -The social and political history, including for instance public communication, legal aspects, border controls, mobility restrictions by States of COVID-19 disease; -[...] response systems and crisis management [...]