No hero outside the hospital lane. Governmental Committees, Pop Star Experts and Conflicts of Expertise in COVID-19-ridden Italy

Italian citizens have become accustomed to the recurrent presence of experts in the country’s decision-making processes. As elsewhere in Europe, an increasing number of “technocrats” (i.e.: professionals with no former partisan involvement possessing recognized expertise which is directly relevant to the role occupied, see McDonnell and Valbruzzi 2014), have been holding ministerial responsibilities. Only in the last three decades, moreover, in a context of general de-structuration of the Italian political landscape, the country experienced three fully technocratic governments, a record in a comparative perspective (Fabbrini 2015). Overall, scholars have found surprisingly high levels of citizens’ support for their political involvement, even in spite of the austerity measure they implemented (Bertsou and Caramani 2020; Ortoleva, 2012). Yet, never have experts played such a significant role in Italy’s decision-making processes as during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, when it has been the first and most hardly hit European country, currently featuring the enormous and still underestimated number of over 50.000 victims. The pandemic highlighted a number of significant structural problems of the Italian political and institutional fields, such as the quantitative and qualitative problems of public administration and public services and the uneven regional fragmentation of the social and healthcare system, particularly evident for the latter, marked by the scarcity of doctors and (in some regional models) the centralization of most of the activities within hospitals at the expense of territorial care (Giarelli, Vicarelli 2020, Gimbe 2019). In this context, shortly before the public recognition of the epidemic outbreak, the government declared the State of Emergency on 31st of January and, at the beginning of February 2020, the central and regional governments instituted “techno-scientific committees” (Comitato Tecnico Scientifico, CTS in Italian), i.e. collective entities charged of working with the political authorities in monitoring the epidemiological situation and adjusting and updating the emergency legislation for the sake of public health. From then onwards, Italy faced a fast sequence of emergency measures until 8 March 2020, with the declaration of the first severe nationwide lockdown in the European continent. In that context, a multiplicity of different committees were actually formed, at different levels. Apart from the CTS, over 15 national level task forces composed by over 450 experts were established at different ministries (Capano 2020) to deal with the more specific challenges posed by the Covid-19 crisis to individual policy sectors. Focusing on the scientific and medical fields, national and regional CTSs represented and still represent to this day the official, albeit territorially fragmented, expertise on Covid-19. They have been instituted and recognized by the political authorities, with which they have nevertheless had a controversial relationship, spanning from complete political submission to scientific and technical knowledge (“we will re-open economic activities only when Science agrees”) to the reclamation of the primacy of the political actors (“the scientists and experts are to serve the government and not the other way around”) resulting in a process of politicization of the expertise (Caselli 2020; Pellizzoni 2011). In this respect, particularly interesting is the recent construction and use of classification tools based on quantitative informational bases for assessing and defining local lockdowns: research shows the nexus between the cognitive and normative dimensions of policy making, as well as the process of politicization of expertise and depoliticization of politics (Mozzana 2019).