The Covid-19 crisis has challenged politics in Europe at all levels of government. The crisis has led to unseen pressures on political decision-makers, democratic institutions and policy-making in the EU and its member states.

The workshop is the second workshop of the EU and Covid-19 research cluster of the European Governance and Politics Programme at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies Projects investigate aspects of the support side, the institutional capacities and the policy-output of different decision-making arenas in the EU in the crisis.

Contributions to the workshop focus in particular on the first wave of the crisis from March to July 2020. The period was the phase of acute crisis characterized by an extraordinary challenge to well-known scripts, values and objectives for policy-making in Europe.

The workshop will assess which input, throughput and output logics of political decision-making in Europe have been uncovered in the course of the first months of the pandemic. Papers will ask if the EU’s democratic institutions and values have been resilient or eroded during the Covid-19 crisis, if we can discern particular patterns of policy-making and if the pandemic was an occasion for change in democratic practices.