Governors in Control: Executive Orders, State-Local Preemption, and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The nation's governors took strong and decisive action in responding to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, often directly affecting their local governments. These actions allow us to examine this question: Will governors' actions in an unprecedented emergency situation centralize the authority of the state or rely on local governments to deal with localized problems? Additionally, what factors affect those decisions? We examine all governors' executive orders affecting local governments in the first five months of the 2020 pandemic. We find that preemption did occur, especially in the early months of the pandemic. States that gave their localities more autonomy were associated with preemption throughout the pandemic; the governor's party affiliation and her ideological match with local officials were associated with greater preemption in some phases of the pandemic but not others.