The COVID-19 crisis and state administration authorities – a systematic review of national regulatory measures adopted in Czechia
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Croatian and Comparative Public Administration |
| Citation | |
| Keywords | regulatory response to COVID-19; organizational change; changes in Czech state administration authorities |
| Description | In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, most countries passed new laws. However, even today, the available literature concentrates mainly on restrictive and coercive measures that impact society as a whole. Specifically, it focuses on the impact of legislation during the COVID-19 period on democracy, parliamentarism or governance, or on measures to support the economy or vulnerable groups and the impact on public budgets. It pays less attention to changes expected in public administration by laws adopted during the COVID-19 period. In this paper, our objective is to identify what specific organisational elements of state administration authorities were most impacted in Czechia by the new law adopted as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve this goal, we conducted a systematic review and the qualitative analysis of legal regulations adopted in the period from March 2020 to October 31 2021 using the PRISMA methodology. To identify legal acts, we used the ASPI information system for the identification of primary and secondary laws. The selected law documents were coded and analysed based on a predefined template; the coding was first executed independently by two researchers and codes were then finalised based on their discussion. The findings show that the government and the Ministry of Health assumed the main role in solving the COVID-19 pandemic in Czechia, secondary law was the key regulator of the functioning of the state administration, and national legal documents most influenced the element "people" and "processes" and on the contrary, at least the "technology" element. |
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