Crisis Management in Public Administration COVID, De-/Centralization and the Public Health Service in Germany

Abstract

The challenges revealed by the COVID-19 crisis are omnipresent. The most urgent is an efficient pandemic response, which is described to be dependent from the institutional design and the organization of crisis management. Therefore, this thesis raises the question of what influence the federalism and the accompanying decentralized organization of the pandemic response has on the crisis management in Germany. Using expert interviews and qualitative methods, three states in Germany are being used as cases and compared according to their institutional design and their challenges in crisis management. On the one hand, it is shown that decentral organized systems can act faster, more pragmatic, and with regard to specific regional needs, which was most beneficial in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, a de facto shift of decision making towards higher levels led to a failure of efficiency in a later phase of crisis. Thus, this thesis can give insights into the street level processes of crisis management and provide possible partial explanations to why Germany went from the best per-forming to one of the average nations in their pandemic response so far.