We investigate the determinants of the severity of U.S. state-level lockdown regulations adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic. We employ a new measure of Lockdown Regulatory Freedom from Miozzi and Powell (Am J Econ Sociol, 2023b. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12512) to investigate whether pre-pandemic measures of economic freedom, political variables, and measures of COVID-19 exposure and severity impacted the severity of subsequent lockdowns. Our main finding is that the severity of a state’s lockdown regulations were primarily determined by pre-pandemic levels of economic freedom and pre-existing political ideology, as measured by the share of votes for the 2016 Democrat presidential candidate.

我们调查了 COVID-19 大流行期间美国州级封锁规定的严重程度的决定因素。我们采用Miozzi 和 Powell 提出的新的“封锁监管自由”措施（Am J Econ Sociol，2023b。https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12512）来调查大流行前的经济自由、政治变量和COVID-19 暴露程度和严重程度的衡量标准影响了随后封锁的严重程度。我们的主要发现是，一个州封锁规定的严重程度主要取决于大流行前的经济自由水平和预先存在的政治意识形态，以 2016 年民主党总统候选人的得票率来衡量。