Publications

When COVID-19 infections began spreading first in China and then in Italy, the PiS government downplayed the threat of a pandemic. Once the pandemic hit Poland, however, the government responded very quickly. Already two days before the first confirmed case of a COVID-19...

Faced with the first recorded case of COVID-19 on 1 March 2020, the Czech government implemented a state of emergency with quite stringent lockdown measures almost immediately and quite effectively. Fear was inspired by news reports of the pandemic in Italy. As of mid-April,...

South Korea was comparably successful both in limiting the spread of the coronavirus pandemic and in limiting its social and economic consequences. As of 15 January 2021, the country had registered 71,820 confirmed Corona cases and 1,217 deaths, and the economy was expected...

The coronavirus crisis has been an unusual event, with no obvious blueprint for action in terms of health or economic policies. Information and knowledge regarding how the pandemic would unfold was and remains incomplete; moreover, lockdown-style restrictions are well...

Spain was one of the countries hardest hit by COVID-19 worldwide, both in terms of infections and deaths. The number of coronavirus cases recorded in Spain since the beginning of the pandemic officially exceeded two million at the beginning of January 2021 and the pandemic...

A key feature of Estonia’s performance during the COVID-19 crisis has been sectoral unevenness. This has mainly been caused by two factors: the varying maturity of institutional structures and paradigmatic policy change.

Portugal approached the pandemic in a largely unenviable position. It had a highly exposed healthcare system, with a very low number of intensive care beds (27th out of the 30 SGI countries in terms of “Intensive Care Beds”), a low number of ventilators (just over 1,000) and...

Finland is among the richest and happiest countries in the world. In spite of cuts in public spending over the past few decades, welfare state arrangements are an important cause of citizens’ satisfaction. Given this, Finland may have been in a better position than many...

Sweden’s approach to managing the coronavirus crisis was dominated by a series of nonbinding guidelines and recommendations that served as the framework for contagion mitigation measures throughout 2020 (Ludvigsson 2020, Petridou 2020), that is, “nudges against pandemics”...

Well-organized democracies have so far navigated their way through the coronavirus crisis better than those with deficits in this area. These democracies have benefited from their forward-looking and participation-oriented approach to governance. However, worrying...