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.

The debate about the future of universal social programmes has been raging for years, both in social-democratic and in liberal welfare states. The objective of this article is to contribute to the literature on universality by analyzing the evolution of universal social programmes in two social-democratic and two liberal countries: Denmark, Sweden, Canada and the UK. This choice of countries provides the opportunity to investigate whether the principle and practice of universality has fared differently both within and between countries. The analysis focuses primarily on the national level while exploring three policy areas: pensions, healthcare and family policy, specifically child benefits and day care. The main conclusion of our comparative analysis is clear: among our two liberal and two social-democratic countries, the institutional strength of universality varies greatly from one policy area and one country to another. Considering this, there is no such a thing as a universal decline of universality.

Federalism plays a foundational role in structuring public expectations about how the United States will respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, as both an unprecedented public-health crisis and an economic recession. As in prior crises, state governments are expected to be primary sites of governing authority, especially when it comes to immediate public-health needs, while it is assumed that the federal government will supply critical countercyclical measures to stabilize the economy and make up for major revenue shortfalls in the states. Yet there are reasons to believe that these expectations will not be fulfilled, especially when it comes to the critical juncture of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though the federal government has the capacity to engage in counter-cyclical spending to stabilize the economy, existing policy instruments vary in the extent to which they leverage that capacity. This leverage, we argue, depends on how decentralized policy arrangements affect the implementation of both discretionary emergency policies as well as automatic stabilization programs such as Unemployment Insurance, Medicaid, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Evidence on the US response to COVID-19 to date suggests the need for major revisions in the architecture of intergovernmental fiscal policy.

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There is a large body of literature devoted to how “policies create politics” and how feedback effects from existing policy legacies shape potential reforms in a particular area. Although much of this literature focuses on self‐reinforcing feedback effects that increase support for existing policies over time, Kent Weaver and his colleagues have recently drawn our attention to self‐undermining effects that can gradually weaken support for such policies. The following contribution explores both self‐reinforcing and self‐undermining policy feedback in relationship to the Affordable Care Act, the most important health‐care reform enacted in the United States since the mid‐1960s. More specifically, the paper draws on the concept of policy feedback to reflect on the political fate of the ACA since its adoption in 2010. We argue that, due in part to its sheer complexity and fragmentation, the ACA generates both self‐reinforcing and self‐undermining feedback effects that, depending of the aspect of the legislation at hand, can either facilitate or impede conservative retrenchment and restructuring. Simultaneously, through a discussion of partisan effects that shape Republican behavior in Congress, we acknowledge the limits of policy feedback in the explanation of policy stability and change.