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Yvonne Hegele, Comparative Federalism and Covid-19: Combating the Pandemic, Edited by Nico Steytler, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Volume 52, Issue 4, Fall 2022, Pages e45–e47, https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjac029
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Federalism has hardly ever received as much public attention as it did during the first months of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic. As Cheryl Saunders puts it in one of the two concluding chapters of this edited volume, “there was a higher level of public understanding of and interest in who was doing what than often is the case” (p. 394). Citizens in federations have realized that not only the central government but also the constituent units have far-reaching decision-making powers affecting their daily life; and that the actions of those two levels of government are not always coherent and coordinated. Against this backdrop, the volume edited by Nico Steytler provides a welcome overview of how federations dealt with the first months of the pandemic. It covers the period from early 2020 until autumn 2020, a time span that was characterized by high uncertainty, time pressure, and various policy responses by governments on all federal levels. It is exactly this situation that puts comparable pressure on federations all over the world, in an almost experimental setting.
