This article addresses the interstate differences in outcomes from the coronavirus disease COVID-19 pandemic by focusing on state capacity. State capacity refers to states’ ability to create and implement policy. We posit that states want to limit death and destruction within their borders. COVID-19 created an instance in which states had a shared, preferred outcome but had very different levels of success. Using a novel measure of state capacity that allows for subnational comparisons – and is independent of ideological political will – we show that states with greater capacity experienced fewer excess deaths during 2020 and more successfully distributed vaccines in early 2021. The findings are robust to various measures of partisanship, social capital, geography, and demographics. Our work bridges US state politics literature and comparative politics literature on state capacity, and it contributes to research on the politics of pandemics.

Canada has not escaped trends in most liberal democracies with the rapid growth of agencies created by government to deliver public goods, often justified on elements of their mandate—service delivery, adjudication of disputes, regulatory oversight, among others—benefiting from an arm's-length relationship to the government of the day. Yet Canadian studies of this phenomenon remain mostly absent from the robust comparative literature theorizing and documenting the emergence of widespread “agencification” and its relationship to performance. This article draws on the Government of Canada's Public Service Employee Survey (PSES) microdata from 2017 to test key hypotheses advanced by proponents of agencification, specifically that agencies are more innovative, autonomous and efficient public organizations. We discover that those working in agencies generally report less climate of innovation and less work autonomy than those working in departments, though some types of agencies—namely regulatory and parliamentary ones—defy these trends.

There is a broad consensus that state capacity is central to economic and institutional development. But while the concept originated as a tool for macro-historical and comparative analysis, its success has led the term ‘capacity’ to become a default metaphor for discussing the quality of government bureaucracies. This paper discusses the limitations to conceiving of narrower questions of bureaucratic performance and policy implementation through the lens of the broad, aggregate concept of capacity. Whereas capacity refers to bureaucracies' hypothetical potential, this usually differs from their actual actions due to internal information and incentive problems created by bureaucracies' collective nature, and the constraints and uncertainty imposed by their multiple political principals. Capacity is a convenient shorthand term and is appropriate for some purposes, but it achieves this convenience by abstracting away from the mechanisms that determine bureaucratic performance and policy implementation. To advance the study of bureaucratic quality, researchers should seek to understand the implications of bureaucracies' collective nature, engage with contextual specificity and contingency in policy implementation, and focus measurement and reform efforts more towards actual performance than hypothetical capacity.

How do voters attribute responsibility for government outcomes when they are the result of a collective decision taken by multiple parties within a coalition government? In this article we test the argument that in a multiparty coalition system, responsibility attribution should vary according to the quantity and quality of portfolios that the coalition partner controls. The article uses data from the Italian National Election Study in Italy, a country usually characterized by governments formed by more than two parties. We find no consistent empirical evidence that coalition parties collectively suffer from perceived negative performance. While the prime minister party is held responsible on average more than the other coalition partners, responsibility attribution decreases by party size in the parliament rather than by the quantity of ministerial portfolios the incumbent party controls. Issue saliency, however, plays an important role in the retrospective voting mechanism. These results have important implications for our understanding of electoral behaviour and democratic accountability.