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ABSTRACT
Italy was the first large epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Western world. Since the country has not had any serious experience with this kind of disease in recent decades, its response has been indicative of a first reaction to an (un)known and (un)expected event. At the same time, the Italian experience is an emblematic case of how a lack of specific preparedness measures drives a country to deal with this kind of crisis through a process in which the existing characteristics of the policy and political system, with all their pros and cons, prevail. This means that the existing country characteristics that affects policy design, state capacity, institutional arrangements and political games forge the process and content of the response. Based on this observation, this paper analyses the policy dynamics of the first four months of management of the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy, focusing on how the health and economic responses were designed and implemented.

Due to its popularity, the term layering is often used generically, and it risks being transformed into a catch‐all concept. Layering has become synonymous with incremental change, thus making it a synonym for change without any specification in terms of the change and its effects. To make the term more conceptually coherent and empirically useful, this article problematizes the historical neo‐institutionalist definition of layering as a mode of change and, above all, its use in the literature. It argues that layering should be conceptualized in terms of modes of institutional design through which different types of additions to the actual institutional arrangement can be activated to pursue not only institutional and eventually policy change but also stability. As an approach to institutional design, layering can be distinguished according to that which is layered and the results that layering can achieve in terms of institutional and policy effects.

This paper traces the developments of quality assurance in the Italian university system since the early 1990s. Based on the theoretical assumption that the 'quality assurance' label covers a wide range of different mixes of policy tools by means of which governments regulate (substantially at a distance) the systemic dynamics of their university systems, this paper adopts a mechanistic perspective in order to show how the Italian version of quality assurance, and of the respective NPM policy tools, has been significantly affected by the ambiguity of governments' approaches to the question, and by the basic inability of universities to perform as corporate actors. This has resulted in quality assurance policy becoming yet another set of formal rules to be complied with, and has had the effect of partially re-centralizing the governance of the entire university system.

Governance in higher education has undergone certain substantial shifts in recent decades. In order to analyse this process from an empirical point of view, a specific understanding of governance, based on the role of the public power in question (state, government or another such power, depending on the context) has been assumed. Changes in systemic governance (and consequently also at the institutional level) are a product in particular of governments' responses to changes in their respective environments. This theoretical assumption, which in this particular study takes the form of a specific typology of governance modes, is employed to analyse those changes witnessed in higher education over the last 20 years. It does this by focusing on four specific national cases (England, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands). The empirical evidence shows that government continues to govern, and has not lost any of its policy‐making power, but has simply changed the way it steers higher education.