Multilevel Government During Crises: Decision-making and implementation by Local and Regional Governments during the COVID-19 Crisis in 31 European Countries

The COVID-19 crisis has put strong pressures on governments to respond. At the start, it was mainly a public health crisis but later became also an economic, a social, transport, and an education crisis. Businesses and schools were closed for long periods, transport and travel was restricted, and employees lost their jobs, and, as a result, governments were forced to develop responses across several policy sectors. A strong expectation in the literature is that crises lead to strong centralization of decision-making. However, subnational governments had a large role in the formation and implementation of policies across the public health, socio-economic, transport and educational policy sectors, especially in the second phase of the crisis when the COVID-19 infection rates increased again (around June/July 2020 in most countries). In this paper we trace the role of regional and local governments in the policy responses during the COVID-19 crisis. We develop a coding scheme that measures decision-making and implementation authority of subnational governments during the COVID-19 crisis. We track local and regional governments’ autonomy in public health (e.g. pandemics, hospitals), transport (e.g. roads, train, bus, tram), socio-economic (e.g. support schemes, unemployment benefits), and education (e.g. closing of schools) policy sectors in 31 European countries during the COVID-19 crisis (January 2020-January 2022). We then compare the levels of authority before, during, and after the COVID-19 crisis and analyse in how far and under which conditions the COVID-19 crisis has led to centralization or decentralization.