The Institutional Underpinnings of Policymaking in the Face of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Europe

Abstract

Chinese authorities identified the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 in January 2020, yet already by early March, there were over 4000 cases in Europe (Spiteri et al., First cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the WHO European Region, 24 January to 21 February 2020. Euro surveillance 25(9): 2000178, 2020), and governments were seeing the disease as a serious threat. The novelty of the disease, along with the array of possible manifestations—with symptoms ranging from nothing at all to severe pneumonia and death—meant that scientific understanding and advice regarding best practices were sometimes ambiguous and often changing as the caseload increased and data and understanding improved. Under such circumstances, it is to be expected that policy responses should differ across countries, as policymakers struggle to evaluate advice in the face of difficult tradeoffs. In hindsight, however, approaching two years since Europe saw its first recognized case, the early and perhaps understandable differences in governmental responses to the pandemic look surprisingly persistent even as the available advice from national and international health authorities has converged and stabilized. This consistency in the range as well as relative efficacy of responses over time suggests systematic underpinnings to policymaking in times of crisis just as for policymaking under more usual circumstances. To gain insight into the drivers of policymaking in the face of the COVID-19 threat, we examine the breadth and severity of initial governmental measures to contain the disease from January through April 2020 in Denmark, Finland, Italy, and Spain. Initial analysis suggests that many of the usual suspects in institutional analysis—system type, electoral rules, and state territorial structure—provide little leverage on either government policy response or health outcomes. We focus here on coalition dynamics and, in particular, the interdependencies between ministries (and ministers’ parties; Alexiadou, Ideologues, partisans, and loyalists. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016) in pandemic policymaking.