Dr Hanna Kleider, from the Department of Political Economy, has received a BA Special Research Grant to fund her research into decentralisation of health systems and regional variations in the COVID-19 responses across five countries.

Dr Kleider, a lecturer in public policy, and Dr Simon Toubeau, from the University of Nottingham, who will also be working on the project, will be analysing the differences in regional policy responses to the pandemic across Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and gauging whether the localised divergences are the result of poor co-ordination or deliberate policy choices.

Outlining the project, Dr Kleider said: “National governments have scrambled to put into place extraordinary measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, ramping-up support for the healthcare system, implementing containment policies and deploying massive economic stimulus packages to tackle the fallout of the crisis.

“Ongoing research efforts have thus duly concentrated on the actions taken at the national level. But, central governments have relied on co-ordinating their actions with regional governments. By wrongly attributing all authority to the national level, the ‘methodological nationalism’ of ongoing work thus risks producing some misleading claims.

“The goal of this project is to study how multi-level governments have coped with this challenge in their response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”