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Canada and the United States are often grouped together as liberal welfare‐state regimes, with broadly similar levels of social spending. Yet, as the COVID‐19 pandemic reveals, the two countries engage in highly divergent approaches to social policymaking during a massive public health emergency. Drawing on evidence from the first 5 months of the pandemic, this article compares social policy measures taken by the United States and Canadian governments in response to COVID‐19. In general, we show that Canadian responses were both more rapid and comprehensive than those of the United States. This variation, we argue, can be explained by analysing the divergent political institutions, pre‐existing policy legacies, and variations in cross‐partisan consensus, which have all shaped national decision‐making in the middle of the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Much has been written about the claim that the British National Health Service (NHS) is becoming more like the US health care system, something a number of commentators view as a form of “Americanization”. Yet, that term is imprecise and unhelpful for rigorous analysis of what has, and has not, happened. This paper uses the lens of policy transfer to explore this issue, which provides a sharper insight into policy development. The paper examines the relevance of the Dolowitz and Marsh framework for the study of policy transfer from the US to the British NHS from 1979 onwards. In terms of the framework’s main research questions, the discussion of the potential US influence on the NHS case stresses the role of policy entrepreneurs in policy transfer. In terms of policy success, however, commentators suggest a mix of uninformed, incomplete, or inappropriate transfer. We conclude that Dolowitz and Marsh do provide a useful framework that asks relevant questions about policy transfer, which provides a more nuanced account of policy transfer from the US to the NHS than the crude term “Americanization”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the global COVID-19 crisis, whereas many world leaders enacted swift lockdown orders and robust testing regimes to preserve public health and to speed up economic recovery, Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil responded to outbreaks by publicly downplaying the significance of the crisis and argued that overly restrictive health measures would create too sizable an economic risk. These two presidents have done much to weaken democracy and trust in government. In this article, we examine the extent to which two institutions in each country––federalism and the party system––impacted the ways in which they framed the COVID-19 crisis and policy responses to it in 2020, especially during the first months of the pandemic. Our evidence suggests that each of these institutions provided opportunities for both leaders to reconstruct public understandings of the crisis while deflecting blame for negative public-health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public policies are the products of political conflict, constituted by mixes of diverse tools and instruments intended to achieve multiple goals that may change over time and not always be internally consistent or coherent. Recent studies dealing with policy robustness and resilience have theorized about the temporal development of mixes of policy instruments and the need to ensure consistency and coherence over time, yet they have generally failed to develop these insights into lessons for policymakers and practitioners. Drawing on evidence from the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) in the USA, this paper examines the relationship between policy mixes and policy resilience or the ability of a policy to withstand challenges to its elements and to remain effective over time, even when deliberate efforts are made to alter, adapt, or repeal all or part of its original content or intention. Although the ACA is at an early stage in its history, it provides many lessons about how, and how not, to design complex policy mixes that can survive determined political opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]