Working Papers
In this section, you can find working papers. Working papers present literature reviews on a topic or the methodological approach of a work package.
Crises, such as natural disasters, terrorist acts, economic breakdowns, or disease outbreaks, pose fundamental challenges to governments. The WP2 literature review shows that while current scholarship reveals much about national, subnational and local responses, it remains limited by a narrow set of research methods, comparisons across cases that are solely of one or another MLG-type, and a lack of specificity regarding the government response studied. The paper proposes a mixed methods research design for testing the framework to better understand the effects of multilevel governance systems on crisis governance responses and citizens’ perceptions of their legitimacy.
The Covid-19 pandemic was a stress test to democracies. To date, however, questions related to the political legitimacy and democratic quality of crisis governance have received little attention in research. To identify indicators of a democratic crisis governance, this working paper has thus reviewed the literature on Covid-19 crisis governance. It also presents an overview of the various cross-national trackers of Covid-19 measures that have been collected. As such, the paper provides the conceptual foundations for the analysis of the relationship between multi-level governance and political legitimacy in crisis governance.
The WP4 literature review shows that human rights, their limitations and suspension as well as the impacts of crisis governance on (social) minorities, marginalized groups and border communities are often mentioned during a crisis, but seldom focused on . It also shows that human rights, including rights of minorities, are among the first victims of crisis situations and crisis management.
The WP5 literature review studies the effect of multilevel governance systems and/or crisis governance on political trust. The goal of this research is to systematize and integrate knowledge of these distinct strands of research, searching for overlaps, in order to get more insight in the phenomenon of political trust.
We could draw some lessons from the existing literature and first evaluations. Besides fast interventions and established risk management frameworks, clear responsibilities and mandates as well as strong internal communication and cooperation mechanisms among agencies and governments have been crucial not only for the adoption of effective public health measures but also for the making and implementation of social, economic and fiscal measures. However, this review has also revealed the need to improve our knowledge of the impact of multilevel governance on the making and implementation of social, economic and fiscal measures.
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