Face mask mandates: Unilateral authority and gubernatorial leadership in US states

• Published date: 01 July 2023
• Author: William M. Myers,Davia C. Downey
• Date: 01 July 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12229

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Face mask mandates: Unilateral authority and

gubernatorial leadership in US states

William M. Myers

1

| Davia C. Downey

2

1

University of Tampa, Tampa, Florida, USA

2

University of Memphis, Memphis,

Tennessee, USA

Correspondence

William M. Myers, University of Tampa,

401 West Kennedy Boulevard, Box 100F,

Tampa, FL 33606, USA.

Email: wmyers@ut.edu

Abstract

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the

United States, the coordination and cooperation between

the federal government and the states failed. American

governors were thus tasked with making critical public

health policy choices—under extreme uncertainty—with

varying institutional capacities, partisan pressures, and

state demographic differences. Yet most of the nation’s

governors chose to impose a face covering or mask

mandate to limit the spread of cases. We collected each

governor’s executive order that mandated the conditions

under which their residents would be required to wear a

mask and employed a sentiment analysis program to

extract key qualities of crisis leadership communication.

Our analyses provide insights into the institutional and

partisan factors that determined a face mask mandate as

well as the institutional, demographic, and leadership

communication qualities that affected the total number of

cases per capita in the states. Our findings have important

implications for post-pandemic policy recommendations

with respect to the effectiveness of policies that seek to

lower the transmission of viruses in public spaces and the

characteristics of impactful public health messaging by

government leaders.

1|INTRODUCTION

Early in the pandemic response, a familiar game emerged in the United States, led by the

Trump administration and state governors seeking to simultaneously avoid blame and claim

credit for their own and the others’successes or failures. On May 12, 2020, President Trump

tweeted: “Remember this, every Governor who has sky high approval on their handling of the

Coronavirus, and I am happy for them all, could in no way have gotten those numbers, or had

that success, without me and the Federal Governments (sic) help.”Less than 2 months earlier,

DOI: 10.1111/lapo.12229

©2023 University of Denver and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Law & Policy. 2023;45:353–372. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/lapo 353

governors were openly expressing their frustration with the federal government’s Coronavirus

response. On March 17, 2020, Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), was asked about

governors sharing strategies to address the pandemic, “Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican

Governor, we’re who people are looking to at a time when there’s not been a lot of clarity or honest

dialogue about the seriousness of this situation”(Martin & Burns, 2020). Governor Tim Pawlenty

(D-MN) followed by saying, “There will be new appreciation for clear, decisive and competent

leadership. And if things get mishandled, botched, miscommunicated in a way that’sviewedas

incompetent or bumbling, politicians will pay a price—as they should”(Martin & Burns, 2020).

These quotes reflect both the frustration with the failure of leadership at the federal level and the

rise of governors and their role in responding to and leading the Coronavirus pandemic response in

the United States.

This article traces the challenges of leadership inherent in federal systems particularly when

faced with a crisis generally, but the COVID-19 pandemic specifically. Governors are the focus

of this analysis because of the tools at their disposal as institutional leaders of government. We

evaluate gubernatorial leadership through an examination of how governors responded to rising

COVID-19 cases by choosing to mandate a key public health mitigation tool: face masks. We

theorize that the decision to implement a face mask mandate was driven by the political and

institutional context of the state and evaluate gubernatorial leadership in terms of how mask

mandates were communicated through executive orders and ultimately whether the intervention

worked to bring down the number of COVID-19 cases during the first year of the pandemic.

Our findings yield important lessons for how political institutions and political leadership

shaped public health messaging—face mask mandates—as states attempted to limit the trans-

mission of the virus.

2|FEDERALISM AND THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Federalism is a political system that is defined by the aspirational ideal of achieving “unity in

diversity”(Palmermo & Kossler, 2017, p. 8) and characterized by at least two tiers of

government that combine elements of self- and shared rule (Elazar, 1987; Watts, 1999). Modern

federal systems have recognized the need for both cooperation and compromise to facilitate

self-determination and autonomy (Hueglin & Fenna, 2015) to manage conflict and ensure

stability (Elazar, 1994). Diversity in governance is a feature, not a bug, of federal systems. The

expectation of self-rule dictates that leaders of each state have the agency to take and make

decisions (Bednar, 2009) that ultimately result in variation across the provision and servicing of

public policy. Autonomy facilitates individualized and tailored policy solutions that meet the

needs of each state while providing comparative advantage to other states to learn and improve

upon policies for their respective populations (Oates, 1999; Tarr, 2001). In practice, however,

the arrangements of federal systems reveal critical flaws not only in terms of complexity

(de Tocqueville, 2004), accountability, transparency, and efficiency (Cutler, 2004).

The prioritization of autonomy and diversity is strained during times of emergency when

coordination and cooperation are critical to overcoming such uncertainty. The necessity for the

levels of government to come together during crises is inherent in the division of powers and

responsibilities that characterize federal systems. The COVID-19 pandemic represents a

boundary-spanning crisis that extends beyond geographical and jurisdictional borders and

easily overwhelms traditional responses to emergencies (Boin et al., 2021; Boin & Rhinard,

2008) in part because of the lack of coordination that is characteristic of heterogenous

governance in federal systems. Emergencies, crises, and disasters are sudden, disruptive,

dangerous, and create existential threats (Boin & ’tHart,2007; Perry, 2007). These events focus

attention on the roles and responsibilities of each level of government and whether there are suffi-

cient institutional mechanisms in place to facilitate cooperation, coordination, and decision-making

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