From Philosophical Juxtaposition to Competing Explanations: An Empirical Method for Comparing Foucault’s and Agamben’s Biopolitical Theories — A Demonstration Using Italy’s Digital COVID-19 Certificate

Comparative scholarship on Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben has generated a substantial philosophical literature, yet studies that treat them as competing explanatory frameworks and compare them against the same empirical materials in a replicable manner remain scarce. The difficulty stems not only from a lack of cases but also from the asymmetry of their evidentiary orientations and temporal scales: Foucault examines historically specific dispositifs, techniques, and processes of subjectification, whereas Agamben uses paradigms, analogies, and structures of exception to disclose political logics across periods. Rather than reducing the two theories to measurable “variables,” they are reconstructed here as ideal-typical mechanisms with distinct observable implications. Structured, focused comparison, congruence analysis, and process tracing are used to pose the same questions to a shared body of evidence. Five criteria guide the comparison: empirical coverage, mechanism specificity, temporal sequencing, resilience to counterevidence, and discipline regarding scope. The Italian Green Pass from 2021 to 2022 serves as a small-scale demonstrative case. The analysis finds that a Foucauldian framework better explains how risk classification, distributed verification, and self-regulation compose everyday governance, while an Agambenian framework more sharply identifies moments when emergency rule conditions rights and produces differential exclusion. Yet statutory authorization, alternative routes to certification, adjustments to time limits, and eventual termination do not support strong claims that law was wholly suspended or that the exception became permanent. In this case, Agamben is therefore more useful as a diagnosis of boundaries, whereas Foucault offers a broader mechanism-based explanation. The contribution lies in turning interpretive debate over which framework is more illuminating into an empirical procedure that specifies which evidence supports which mechanism and what evidence could disconfirm a claim.