When blame is shared, governments act: electoral incentives and crisis governance in federal systems
Summarising his recent article in Regional & Federal Studies, Onsel Gurel Bayrali explores how electoral incentives shape crisis governance in federal systems, focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic. He argues that the degree of “electoral correspondence” between national and regional governments determines whether they act collaboratively or engage in blame avoidance. Where electoral fortunes are aligned, governments are more likely to share risks and coordinate policy responses; where they are not, responsibility is often shifted, leading to uneven action. Drawing on cross-national evidence, the post highlights how political incentives—rather than institutional design alone—drive coordination in times of crisis.
The COVID-19 pandemic placed federal systems under intense pressure. In many countries, responsibility for public health is shared between national and regional governments, creating a setting where coordination is essential. Yet the pandemic revealed striking differences in how these systems responded. Some federations displayed sustained and joint policy engagement across levels of government, while others experienced uneven responses, with one level acting while the other stepped back. Why does this happen?
Crisis policies are politically costly, but not in a neutral sense. The costs are immediate, visible, and directly attributable to politicians. Measures such as lockdowns, business closures, and mobility restrictions impose clear burdens on citizens, and incumbents are held responsible for these decisions. The benefits, by contrast, are uncertain, harder to observe, and often realised only in the longer term. Avoided infections or deaths do not generate the same immediate political credit. In this context, blame avoidance becomes central to crisis governance, as governments must decide whether to accept the political cost of action or shift responsibility to another level.
Whether governments engage or withdraw therefore depends on how their electoral incentives are structured. The key concept is electoral correspondence, which refers to the extent to which electoral outcomes at the national and regional levels align within a given territory. In some regions, the same parties dominate across both levels, and voters treat them as part of a shared political configuration. In others, electoral competition differs across levels, and political actors face distinct and disconnected constituencies. This distinction has important consequences for crisis governance because it shapes how politicians interpret the risks of action and inaction.
When electoral correspondence is high, national and regional politicians are tied to a shared electoral fate. Voters are more likely to evaluate them together, and political successes or failures at one level can spill over to the other. In such settings, blame avoidance becomes difficult to sustain. If one level of government fails to act, the reputational costs are likely to be shared. This creates incentives for joint engagement. Both levels are more likely to introduce restrictive measures, remain active in policymaking, and tolerate overlapping interventions. In short, they share the political risk.
When electoral correspondence is low, these linkages weaken. National and regional politicians face different electoral audiences and can more easily distance themselves from one another. This makes blame avoidance a viable strategy, as each level can attribute unpopular decisions, or the absence of action, to the other. Governments may therefore strategically limit their engagement, hoping to avoid the political costs associated with crisis policies. In these cases, responsibility is often pushed downward, leaving regional governments to carry a disproportionate share of the burden. This perspective shifts how we understand coordination in federal systems. Rather than treating coordination as a purely institutional outcome, it highlights how electoral incentives shape political behaviour during crises.
Evidence from the pandemic supports this argument. Drawing on data from more than 300 regions across 14 federal countries, patterns of policy activity can be traced using the Public Health Protective Policy Index, which records non-medical interventions such as closures, mobility restrictions, and public space regulations at both national and regional levels. This makes it possible to observe not only how much governments acted, but also how responsibility was distributed across levels.
Two patterns stand out. Where electoral outcomes were more closely aligned across national and regional levels, governments at both tiers were more active in introducing restrictive measures and more likely to act together, producing overlapping policies and a more balanced distribution of responsibility. Where electoral correspondence was weaker, national governments were less engaged, policy overlap declined, and regional authorities carried a larger share of the burden. These differences reflect how political actors respond to the incentives created by their electoral environment rather than differences in formal institutional design.
The implications extend beyond the pandemic. Federal systems are often praised for their flexibility and capacity to tailor policies to local conditions, but this flexibility also creates opportunities for strategic behaviour. When responsibility is shared, so too is the possibility of avoiding it. Effective crisis governance therefore depends not only on who has formal authority, but on whether political actors have incentives to use it.
More broadly, coordination in multilevel systems is not simply about aligning policies. It is about aligning incentives. When political risks are shared, governments are more likely to act together. When they are not, even well-designed systems may struggle to produce coordinated responses.
The pandemic made this dynamic visible, but it is not unique to public health crises. Similar patterns are likely to emerge in other policy areas that involve high political costs and shared authority, including climate policy, energy transitions, and fiscal adjustment. In each case, the question is not only what governments can do, but whether they are willing to do it together.
Federal systems do not falter in crises because they are federal. They falter when the political incentives that link their different levels of government pull them apart rather than bring them together.
Onsel Gurel Bayrali is an Adjunct Lecturer in Political Science at Binghamton University. His research focuses on comparative politics and political economy, with an emphasis on institutions, governance, and policy processes in multilevel systems.
Note: this blog represents the views of the author, and not those of Regional & Federal Studies, the Centre on Constitutional Change, or the University of Edinburgh. It summarises the article ‘Electoral incentives, blame-shifting, and crisis governance: the role of electoral correspondence in federal policy coordination’.
Image credit: Lukas Beck, CC 4.0 International via Wikipedia
