Preexisting political institutions influence governments' responses to public health crises in different ways, creating national variations. This article investigates how state capacity, a country's fundamental ability to organize bureaucracy and allocate societal resources, affects the timing and configuration of governments' COVID‐19 policy responses. Through comparative case study analysis of five of China's neighboring countries early in the COVID‐19 crisis, the paper shows that more‐capable states (Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan) initiated crisis response faster, mobilized national resources more extensively, and utilized diverse policy tools when the virus risk level was still low. In contrast, low‐capacity states (Thailand and Indonesia) were more reactive in handling the crisis, limited their focus to border‐related measures, and were more constrained in the types of tools they could employ. The paper points to the importance of studying the COVID‐19 response process rather than the outcome (i.e., confirmed cases/deaths) when unpacking the impacts of political institutions in public health crises.

Environmental nonprofit organisations (ENPOs) have become crucial policy actors who have undertaken information campaigns to attract public attention and to gain public support for policies. However, the credibility of policy information released by ENPOs is understudied. To fill the gap, this study utilised Douglas and Wildavsky’s cultural theory (CT), to seek answers to two questions: 1) how do ENPOs’ public faces affect public perception of the credibility of the policy information released by their organisations? 2) how do the public’s worldviews affect trust in information released by ENPOs with different types of public faces? The evidence from an online survey confirms what CT predicted: Hierarchs tend to believe information released by policy actors with proper authority; individualists tend to believe information released by policy actors who favour economic growth over environmental protection; egalitarians favour all pro-environmental policy information even if the information is released by noncredible policy actors.