Public policy must confront emergencies that evolve in real time and in uncertain directions, yet little is known about the nature of policy response. Here we take the coronavirus pandemic as a global and extraordinarily consequential case, and study the global policy response by analyzing a novel dataset recording policy documents published by government agencies, think tanks, and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) across 114 countries (37,725 policy documents from Jan 2nd through May 26th 2020). Our analyses reveal four primary findings. (1) Global policy attention to COVID-19 follows a remarkably similar trajectory as the total confirmed cases of COVID-19, yet with evolving policy focus from public health to broader social issues. (2) The COVID-19 policy frontier disproportionately draws on the latest, peer-reviewed, and high-impact scientific insights. Moreover, policy documents that cite science appear especially impactful within the policy domain. (3) The global policy frontier is primarily interconnected through IGOs, such as the WHO, which produce policy documents that are central to the COVID19 policy network and draw especially strongly on scientific literature. Removing IGOs' contributions fundamentally alters the global policy landscape, with the policy citation network among government agencies increasingly fragmented into many isolated clusters. (4) Countries exhibit highly heterogeneous policy attention to COVID-19. Most strikingly, a country's early policy attention to COVID-19 shows a surprising degree of predictability for the country's subsequent deaths. Overall, these results uncover fundamental patterns of policy interactions and, given the consequential nature of emergent threats and the paucity of quantitative approaches to understand them, open up novel dimensions for assessing and effectively coordinating global and local responses to COVID-19 and beyond.

中文翻译：

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量化对全球紧急情况的政策反应：来自 COVID-19 大流行的见解

公共政策必须应对实时变化且方向不确定的紧急情况，但人们对政策响应的性质知之甚少。在这里，我们将冠状病毒大流行视为一个全球性的、后果极其严重的案例，并通过分析记录了 114 个国家/地区的政府机构、智囊团和政府间组织 (IGO) 发布的政策文件的新数据集（来自 37,725 份政策文件）来研究全球政策反应。 2020 年 1 月 2 日至 5 月 26 日）。我们的分析揭示了四个主要发现。(1) 全球对 COVID-19 的政策关注遵循与 COVID-19 确诊病例总数非常相似的轨迹，但政策重点从公共卫生转向更广泛的社会问题。(2) COVID-19 政策前沿不成比例地借鉴了最新的、经过同行评审的、和高影响力的科学见解。此外，引用科学的政策文件在政策领域似乎特别有影响力。(3) 全球政策前沿主要通过 IGO 相互联系，例如 WHO，它们制定了对 COVID19 政策网络至关重要的政策文件，并特别强烈地借鉴了科学文献。取消政府间组织的贡献从根本上改变了全球政策格局，政府机构之间的政策引文网络越来越分散成许多孤立的集群。(4) 各国对 COVID-19 表现出高度异质的政策关注。最引人注目的是，一个国家对 COVID-19 的早期政策关注表明，该国随后的死亡人数具有惊人的可预测性。总体而言，这些结果揭示了政策互动的基本模式，并且，