When Local Governments' Stay-at-Home Orders Meet the White House's "Opening Up America Again"

TL;DR

This study analyzes how local stay-at-home orders and the White House's reopening campaign affected community mobility in U.S. counties, revealing political ideology influences compliance and highlighting local authority effectiveness.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the interaction between federal reopening policies and local orders, emphasizing political polarization's role in mobility changes during COVID-19.

Findings

Stay-at-home orders reduced retail activity by 27%.

Reopening campaign increased retail activity more in conservative counties.

Local orders remained somewhat effective despite federal reopening efforts.

Abstract

On April 16th, The White House launched "Opening up America Again" (OuAA) campaign while many U.S. counties had stay-at-home orders in place. We created a panel data set of 1,563 U.S. counties to study the impact of U.S. counties' stay-at-home orders on community mobility before and after The White House's campaign to reopen the country. Our results suggest that before the OuAA campaign stay-at-home orders brought down time spent in retail and recreation businesses by about 27% for typical conservative and liberal counties. However, after the launch of OuAA campaign, the time spent at retail and recreational businesses in a typical conservative county increased significantly more than in liberal counties (15% increase in a typical conservative county Vs. 9% increase in a typical liberal county). We also found that in conservative counties with stay-at-home orders in place, time spent at retail and recreational businesses increased less than that of conservative counties without stay-at-home orders. These findings illuminate to what extent residents' political ideology could determine to what extent they follow local orders and to what extent the White House's OuAA campaign polarized the obedience between liberal and conservative counties. The silver lining in our study is that even when the federal government was reopening the country, the local authorities that enforced stay-at-home restrictions were to some extent effective.