Sub-national Diversity and National Action: German and Italian Regions' Responses to Covid-19.

The aim of this paper is to analyze how the Covid-19 virus pandemic has affected center-periphery relations in two EU member-states, Germany and Italy, that organized their first response to the onset of the pandemic in fairly similar ways. The present paper will therefore focus on the particular effects that “pandemic politics” has had on two members of the Union’s system of multilevel governance with the aim to uncover the institutional and political dynamics that were unleashed by the pandemic within them. It will contrast two approaches to multilevel governance. One approach underscores the coordination disadvantages deriving from adopting differentiated policy measures at sub-national levels of government during a pandemic which, by its nature, hardly stops at jurisdictional boundaries. The other emphasizes the informational and experimental advantages of allowing a certain degree of policy differentiation at subnational levels of government. We conclude, momentarily on the basis of secondary evidence, that both have something to contribute to the understanding of the dynamics experienced in Italy and Germany but that in order to appreciate why they unfolded, other political and historical factors must also be taken into account. It further signals the importance of subnational-specific factors in explaining the internal differentiation among subnational levels within the same country.