I have to admit that I also have succumbed to this COVID19 crisis fever as an opportunity to study social phenomena. Hopefully a work with the colleagues of the EU-Society group will come out soon, on the impact of the crisis on bureaucratic discrimination.

In the meantime, a recently published work with Christoph Knill, Yves Steinebach and Steffen Hurka at Policy Studies Journal (and more details and appendix) was selected by the editorial team to be included in a special issue entitled “Advice and Consent in the Era of Global Pandemic: An Introduction to the PSJ Virtual Special Issue in Response to COVID-19 Crisis”.

It is not possible to predict or forecast precise events out of this crisis, but according to our findings, in periods of crisis politicians move the gear of public policy following the window of opportunity, and they do so in a way that policy changes in areas not affected by crisis are more incremental (we look at the variance of policy change from one year to another, and how it is driven by different factors), but at the same time if policy change happens it is more extreme. So it’s like policy decisions are in a “let’s stop and wait” mode, but at the same time there is a chance of “let’s do something radical” mode happening.

For the current crisis, this implies that we would observe less policy change in general in subsystems that are not affected by the crisis (economic and health sectors), but at the same time, in very few instances this can be used to make radical changes.