As COVID-19 rapidly spread across the globe, every government in the world has been forced to enact policies to slow the spread of the virus. While leaders often claim responses are based on the best available advice from scientists and public health experts, recent policy diffusion research suggests that countries are emulating the COVID-19 policies of their neighbors instead of responding to domestic conditions. Political and geographic considerations play a role in determining which countries imitate one another, but even among countries that are politically or geographically distant, nationalist regimes seem to favor certain approaches towards the pandemic. We investigate why this is the case by examining whether countries that embrace a nationalist ideology are more likely to emulate the COVID-19 policies of similarly nationalist regimes. We demonstrate that, even after controlling for domestic circumstances and linguistic, trade, geographic, and political connections, nationalist countries are emulating each other’s responses. These results are robust and shed light not only on new mechanisms of policy diffusion but also on the growing international cooperation of nationalist regimes and leaders.

The COVID‐19 crisis demanded rapid, widespread policy action. In response, nations turned to different forms of social distancing policies to reduce the spread of the virus. These policies were implemented globally, proving as contagious as the virus they are meant to prevent. Yet, variation in their implementation invites questions as to how and why countries adopt social distancing policies, and whether the causal mechanisms driving these policy adoptions are based on internal resources and problem conditions or other external factors such as conditions in other countries. We leverage daily changes in international social distancing policies to understand the impacts of problem characteristics, institutional and economic context, and peer effects on social distancing policy adoption. Using fixed‐effects models on an international panel of daily data from 2020, we find that peer effects, particularly mimicry of geographic neighbors, political peers, and language agnates drive policy diffusion and shape countries' policy choices.

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