US Political Leadership and Crisis Communication During COVID-19 (original) (raw)
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Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique environment from which each individual state, in the United States, has been forced to address their publics. In order to understand how each state has engaged with this pandemic, a textual analysis of each state's governor's first press release was conducted; five thematic trends were identified. Through use of the social trust approach to risk communication and the contingency theory of strategic conflict management (using external threat variables), the implications of these press releases are discussed.
Crisis leadership during COVID-19: the role of governors in the United States
International Journal of Public Leadership, 2020
PurposeThe purpose of this viewpoint article is to understand crisis leadership during COVID-19 by examining the decision-making with respect to implementing COVID-19 mitigation measures, collaboration with stakeholders, and communication strategies of the governors of the States of California, Texas, Florida, and New York in the United States.Design/methodology/approachThis viewpoint article employs information from the extant literature on crisis leadership and secondary sources to understand the four governor's crisis leadership strategies during COVID-19.FindingsGovernors Gavin Newsom of California and Andrew Cuomo of New York made quicker decisions regarding implementing COVID-19 mitigation measures (e.g. shutting down the economy, mandating physical distancing, issuing stay-at-home orders, mandating wearing face covering in public and issuing a state of emergency) compared to Governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida. In addition, all four governors collab...
Healthcare, 2024
This scoping review maps communication strategies employed by political leaders in countries that experienced high infection rates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the Arksey and O’Malley scoping review framework, this study systematically explored the literature from 2019 to October 2023. The process involved identifying and selecting relevant studies, charting them, and summarizing the data from the 40 articles that met the inclusion criteria. This review identified a diverse array of communication strategies, which highlight the complex nature of crisis communication. These strategies featured the use of social media, science-based policy communication, strategic narrative control, empathy, ideological influences, and storytelling. These six approaches underscore the importance of adaptability and context-specific strategies in political leadership during a health crisis. The findings demonstrate that political communication during the pandemic varied significantly and was influenced by factors such as media platform, political ideology, gender, and non-verbal cues. This review enriches our understanding of crisis communication in political contexts. It emphasizes the necessity of combining traditional and digital media and considering various sociopolitical factors. The insights gained are crucial for enhancing crisis management and public trust, and they set the stage for further research and practical application in crisis communication.
Messages in Conflict: Examining Leadership Communication during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the U.S
Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research, 2021
One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. had lost over a half million lives to the virus. Organizations had to shift the way they operated, requiring effective communication to help employees transition. This study examines two important time periods during the pandemic: early May, just after stay-at-home orders began to be lifted, and late November, as infection rates soared. This study quantitatively examines the role of perceived severity, organizational trust, reputation, and credibility on participants employed during the pandemic expectations of leadership at the organizational, state, and federal levels. Then, participants were interviewed to understand perceptions of leadership. Results illustrate the relationship between perceived severity of the threat and trust in leadership and uncertainty about mitigation measures from state and federal levels.
Book chapter in "Political Discourse and Media in Times of Crisis"- Edited by Sofia Iordanidou Nael Jebril Emmanouil Takas Anthem Global Media and Communication Studies, 2023
Abstract This chapter presents the findings of a cross-national analysis of the discourse of five political leaders (USA, UK, Germany, Greece, New Zealand) during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, as evidenced in their public statements, announcements and messaging related to the unfolding of epidemic events. Through a discourse analysis of 16 pandemic-related political leaders' texts, this study uncovers how the selected political actors employed discourse as a means to strategically appropriate the critical exigence and as a tool to achieve legitimation and exert persuasive impact on their audiences through speech, arguments, rhetorical, discursive, and meta-discursive elements. The study's results indicate that strategic intentionality and legitimation are integral parts of pandemic-related political discourse. Collected data provide evidence that political rhetoric and discursive tropes were strategically employed by all political leaders in their effort to define the situation, manage the issue, influence public attitudes and policies, establish the core values of the nation and their governance, and ultimately, "construct" and "re-figure" the pandemic reality as experienced at the national level. Despite commonalities, the leaders employed diversified, even antithetical rhetorical and legitimation responses to the public health crisis and appropriated the exigence through different discursive choices and assessments of audience, purpose and message.
Performing COVID-19: Trump’s Shift of Rhetoric During the Coronavirus Crisis in the Usa
Ezikov Svyat (Orbis Linguarum)
The article studies American President Donald Trump’s discourse within the period between January and March, 2020, when he had to respond to the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak in the USA. The material of the research was collected through continuous sampling and contains the president’s tweets, interviews and White House briefing conferences. The method applied to analyze the sample is three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) that ensures achieving the purpose of the study, namely to explore Trump’s discursive strategies employed to address the coronavirus crisis, to preserve the politician’s domination in the public discourse and to react to the criticisms of his opponents and oppositional mass media that pictured the virus as a dire threat and accused the president of inefficacy and negligence. The analysis has revealed a shift in Trump’s discursive strategies starting from the middle of March, 2020: while in January the president attempted to maintain the social...
Crisis Leadership: Political Leadership during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Sustainability
This article identifies leadership attributes that enable effective leaders to manage crises. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews with 13 Australian political leaders, including senators, members of federal and state parliament, premiers, ministers, and mayors of local governments. The findings suggest that, to be an effective leader during a crisis, political leaders need to be: visionary; courageous; calm; inspirational; ethical; empathetic; authentic; and resilient. Single leadership theories do not capture all the attributes necessary to lead during a crisis, suggesting the importance of different, complementary theories. The findings clarify what it takes for politicians to lead during a global crisis, like COVID-19. Furthermore, they provide a foundation to enable constituents to gauge their political leaders’ leadership capacities. Despite extensive research on what it takes to lead, little is known about political leadership during a crisis. The study unveils ...
International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 2021
Crisis management strategies have taken a new significance amidst the COVID-19 crisis. In Canada, while the tone of media coverage of political leaders is usually stable over time, the pandemic has provoked variation that provides an opportunity to test the effect of leaders' crisis management strategies on the tone of media coverage. Using a unique dataset of online front-page articles from 11 Canadian media outlets, an automated textual analysis, and a regression discontinuity design, this paper estimates how Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Quebec Premier François Legault's COVID-19 early crisis management affected the media coverage devoted to them. Results show that Legault's crisis management had a short-term positive effect on his media coverage, while Trudeau's effect is null. These findings raise questions about the link between media, decision-makers and public opinion. Keywords political communication, media coverage, COVID-19 crisis. This paper proposes an experimental test using the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to estimate the effect of crisis management on the tone of media coverage of political leaders. It is unique in two ways: first, it relies on an original dataset of Canadian media online front-page articles and, second, it uses text as data with a regression discontinuity design.
Analysis of crisis communication by the Prime Minister of Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2021
Leadership and communication capabilities of federal leaders during crises are imperative to support and guide citizens' behaviors and emotions. The following content analysis examines crisis communication delivered by the Australian Prime Minister (PM), Scott Morrison during the COVID-19 pandemic. Communication delivered over seven months starting from the first reported case of COVID-19 in Australia, was analyzed through a process of coding to identify central organizing crisis communication frames and themes and measured against eleven main themes based on principles of Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) recommended by the WHO and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Transcripts were sourced from the PM's official website and 91 communiques were analyzed. Key epidemiological indicators and public health measures were reviewed over timeframe to examine changes in communication over the pandemic. Findings indicated that PM Morrison included many features of CERC within his official messaging. Our analysis revealed that the original framework was limited in its scope to encompass certain messages and thus the allocation of new frames,'public health and medical advice' and 'assuring and commending the public and institutions', allowed for a more thorough analysis of communication during a novel global health pandemic. The temporal analysis demonstrated that the government's policy and communication temporally followed case numbers and relative threat of the virus. This study has provided an in-depth review of CERC during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. New frames and themes for the current CERC framework are suggested which can be transferable to other crises in Australia and other countries.
Journal of Central Banking Law and Institutions
Our study explores economic policy communication in response to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. Considering a major role of Twitter in information dissemination, we use tweets as a proxy to examine politicians’ crisis communication strategies in five countries, Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, and Singapore. By using systematic content analysis approach, the study attested the degree to which SCCT and IRT model can be applied to political realm. We found two strategies, bolstering and mortification, emerge as the most frequently used strategies by politicians. Further, new strategies, i.e information provision and cohesion, as well as new categories, i.e morale boosting, political positioning, and cross border cooperation surfaced which further expanding the SCCT and IRT model in explaining political crisis communication. As this study explores the role of context and situational factors that determine specific strategies, our findings demonstrate no substantial differences among ...