Institutional arrangements of government and municipal response to the COVID-19 pandemic

This study proposes a research strategy that treats a government form as a specific arrangement of institutional features and conducts the study of government form at the institutional-feature level. Consistently, it examines how the three core features of a government–CEO (chief executive officer) selection by appointment based on managerial expertise, mayoral election by the council among themselves, and at-large council election–affect municipal COVID response, a highly politicized area. These features are theorized to reduce the intensity of politics and create space for the effective working of public administration, and hypothesized to be positively associated with active COVID response. The hypotheses are confirmed on the whole from the analysis of original survey data gathered during the pandemic from municipalities in eleven western U.S. states. The implications of the findings for the council-manager form of government are discussed.