Application of the Policy Regime Framework to understand COVID-19 policy response in the Southeast US: How RAPID research can provide lessons learned after a public health crisis

Quick-response research during a time of crisis is important because time-sensitive findings can inform urgent decision-making, even with limited research budgets. This research, a National Science Foundation-funded Rapid Response Research (RAPID), explores the United States (U.S.) government's messaging on science in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and how this messaging informed policy. Using rapidly emerging secondary data (e.g., policy documents taken from government websites and others), much of which has since been removed or changed, we examined the interactions between governing bodies, non-governmental organizations, and civilian populations in the Southeastern U.S. during the first 2 years of the pandemic. This research helps to better understand how decision-makers at the federal, state, and local levels responded to the pandemic in three states with the lowest vaccine rates and highest levels of poverty, income inequality, and disproportionate impacts borne by people of color in the nation: Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. This study incorporates the Policy Regime Framework to discuss how two foundational concepts (ideas and institutions) helped govern policy implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research fills a significant information gap by providing a better understanding of how policy regimes emerge across multiple levels of government and impact vulnerable populations during times of a public health crisis. We use automated text analysis to make sense of a large quantity of textual data from policy-making agencies. Our case study is the first to use the Policy Regime Framework in conjunction with empirical data, as it emerged, from federal, state, and local governments to analyze the U.S. policy response to COVID-19. We found the U.S. policy response included two distinct messaging periods in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic: pre and post-vaccine. Many messaging data sources (agency websites, public service announcements, etc). have since been changed since we collected them, thus our real-time RAPID research enabled an accurate snapshot of a policy response in a crisis. We also found that there were significant differences in the ways that federal, state, and local governments approached communicating complex ideas to the public in each period. Thus, our RAPID research demonstrates how significant policy regimes are enacted and how messaging from these regimes can impact vulnerable populations.