National decision-making during the pandemic crisis: Italian regions' participation in different arenas

On 31 March 2022 Italy dismissed the ‘emergency status’ declared at the beginning of 2020 after the abruption of the Covid-19 virus. As elsewhere, the pandemic crisis required the collaboration of all levels of governance to be limited. In Italy, regions played a relevant role during the health crisis because of their powers in the management of the health sector and because of their proximity to the population needs. Furthermore, the Covid-19 emergency arose in a period of change of intergovernmental relations: some of the Italian regions had requested greater autonomy to the national government in relevant welfare sectors at the end of 2018; the beginning of these State-regions negotiations coincided with a new discussion around the topics of autonomism and federalism. For these reasons, the pandemic crisis represented an opportunity for Italian subnational governments to strengthen their political position in front of the central government by participating in the fight against the virus. Recently, some authors have been interested in the understanding of the consequences of the pandemic on Italian intergovernmental relations. They argue that regions have been marginalized from the decision-making by the national government, even more so during the Draghi presidency from February 2021. However, they also argue that the Presidents of Regions (elected by regional direct elections) acquired even more legitimacy and, in some cases, popularity; furthermore, they suggested that degree of regions’ marginalization depended on the level of institutionalization and policy issue of the decision-making. Based on these considerations, we expect that subnational governments’ participation in the decision-making processes depended on the typology of policy to be approved, i.e., the policy arena; furthermore, we also expect that regions themselves adopted a different behaviour on the basis of the arena in which they played: a more cooperative behaviour in the regulative arena, that focused on the adoption of rules and restrictive measures; a more partisan approach in the distributive arena, that focused on the distribution of resources to cope with the consequences of the crisis. The aim of the paper is to investigate whether the degree of Italian subnational governments’ participation in national decision-making depended on the typology of arena in which actors played: the different policy issue at stake could have influenced both the national government’s inclination in engaging other actors in the process and the cooperative/uncooperative attitude of subnational governments, that ultimately affected their “voice” capacity. The analysis uses different primary and secondary sources: the national legislation, the documents produced by the so-called “Conferences” (intergovernmental/regional bodies for confrontation), the newspapers articles from 1 January 2020 to 31 March 2022. The reconstruction of decision-making processes will allow a better understanding of the Italian intergovernmental relations during the pandemic crisis: under which circumstances were regions capable to participate and influence national decisions?