Abstract. Regulatory instruments to manage the COVID-19 pandemic have been the object of rich scholarly debates, primarily focused on early national responses to the crisis. We investigate variation in sub-national regulatory approaches when a crisis is normalized, its association with competing political ideas about the health-economy trade-off and the coercion-persuasion continuum, and the specificities of the socio-economic context to be regulated. We systematically compare the regulatory approaches implemented in four Spanish regions between October 2020 and May 2021, triangulating data from 237 policy documents and 40 semi-structured interviews. Our findings partially confirm the association between competing political ideas about the health-economy trade-off and regulation content. At the same time, they challenge the relevance of party ideology on the type of enforcement strategies. Political considerations of regulation are mediated by the nature of a crisis and by pragmatic concerns about the harm it can cause, depending on the context to be regulated.