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Context: While the World Health Organization (WHO) has established guidance on COVID-19 surveillance, little is known about implementation of these guidelines in federations, which fragment authority across multiple levels of government. This study examines how subnational governments in federal democracies collect and report data on COVID-19 cases and mortality associated with COVID-19. Methods: We collected data from subnational government websites in 15 federal democracies to construct indices of COVID-19 data quality. Using bivariate and multivariate regression, we analyzed the relationship between these indices and indicators of state capacity, the decentralization of resources and authority, and the quality of democratic institutions. We supplement these quantitative analyses with qualitative case studies of subnational COVID-19 data in Brazil, Spain, and the United States. Findings: Subnational governments in federations vary in their collection of data on COVID-19 mortality, testing, hospitalization, and demographics. There are statistically significant associations (p<0.05) between subnational data quality and key indicators of public health system capacity, fiscal decentralization, and the quality of democratic institutions. Case studies illustrate the importance of both governmental and civil-society institutions that foster accountability. Conclusions: The quality of subnational COVID-19 surveillance data in federations depends in part on public health system capacity, fiscal decentralization, and the quality of democracy.

The Eurozone crisis has triggered profound political and economic changes across the debtor member states. This article shows how the crisis and the imposition of austerity policies by the Troika have (1) forced Spain (and by extension other Eurozone debtor states) to pursue internal devaluation as a means of economic adjustment through the reduction of real wages, (2) increased pressure for liberalizing labor market institutions, and (3) given Spain’s conservative government the opportunity and cover to pursue radical neoliberal labor law reforms. Spain’s 2012 labor law reforms went well beyond external demands. The crisis and the Troika’s policy demands generated mass unemployment, devastated Spain’s Socialist Party, and created the enabling conditions for economic reforms. But domestic partisan considerations led the conservative People’s Party (PP) to commandeer the crisis to weaken unions as the electoral and organizational base of the center-left opposition. The PP channeled reform into an attack on labor that decisively shifted power to employers. As organized labor relations were reduced to concession bargaining, real wages have plummeted for the vast majority of Spaniards, even as mass unemployment and economic stagnation persist. Analysis suggests the emergence of a winner-take-all economy that will have lasting consequences for the Eurozone and the European Union.

Firms may find competitive adjustment difficult because they are hamstrung by rigid labor market rules. However, such difficulties may also be caused by conflicts between strategic choices in the management of human capital and the opportunities and limitations created by a given regulatory framework. This latter possibility has been almost totally ignored in the debate regarding the urgency and content of labor market reforms in countries whose labor market institutions have been labeled as “rigid” by international experts. This article uses the results of qualitative interviews with Spanish employers to suggest that strategic choices may be far more important in determining the consequences of labor market institutions than is generally recognized. I show that these choices are often the result of beliefs about how labor market institutions should work. These findings suggest that supposedly “neutral” calls for greater efficiency in labor market institutions are really arguments about the relative appropriateness of different expectations regarding how firms should pursue adjustment, expectations that are directly related both to the relative balance of power between employers and workers and to the structure of their relationship. In other words, the phrase “politics of labor market reform” should be understood to refer not only to the political consequences of reforms but also to the inherently political nature of the reforms themselves.