A new empirical study by researchers from TU Ilmenau, published in the prestigious European Journal of Law and Economics, analyses the behavior of German prime ministers and their governments during the Covid-19 pandemic. The article “Forerunners vs. Latecomers—Institutional Competition in the German Federalism during the COVID Crisis” identifies distinct strategies of regional governments and their leaders regarding the announcement, codification, and enforcement of restrictive measures combating the Covid-19 crisis. Some were systematically leading the institutional competition, others were permanently among the last to react. However, the authors Lukas Breide, Oliver Budzinski, Thomas Grebel, and Juliane Mendelsohn also identify announcement champions which remained slow and late in codification and enforcement, silent enforcers focusing on codification and enforcement instead of announcements, as well as hidden codification champions which neither shone in announcements nor actual enforcement.
Using the unique setting of state-level pandemic policies within Germany’s federalism, the paper contributes to the general understanding of institutional competition in federations. Its novel distinction between (media-based) announcements, (law-crafted) codification, and (policy-based) actual enforcement of interventions against the pandemic spreading of Covid-19 highlights the necessity to look beyond pure actions in institutional competition or, respectively, to disentangle “political action” into these dimensions.