Leading with Words: Practices of Crisis Leadership in Comparative Perspective

Periods of crisis are characterized by generalized uncertainty and disruption of ‘life as usual’. In such times, political leadership plays a crucial role in producing collective meaning to mobilize cooperative action and steer societies back to ‘normal’. Rhetoric is a fundamental part of this process of negotiating the (re)construction of order. How national leaders attribute meaning and communicate policy in their utterances influences our collective sense of reality and affects the perception of legitimacy of actions taken. Here we explore how the leaders of three industrialized major powers (Germany, the UK, and the US) and three rising powers (Brazil, China, and India) communicated the crisis and mitigation efforts to national audiences in their early speeches during the COVID-19 pandemic. We combine a pragmatic linguistic approach with leadership analysis to understand the values and assumptions that are mobilized through language to claim legitimacy for particular policies. From a linguistic standpoint, we adopt Patrick Charaudeau’s perspective on modalisations to understand how leaders project themselves in speech and establish their relationship with the message and the audience. We then use inductive discourse analysis to identify whether and how the core tasks of crisis leadership ­– as elaborated by Arjen Boin, Paul ‘t Hart, and Eric K. Stern­­ – are communicated in these speeches. Besides providing a first inventory of ‘crisis leadership’ during a pandemic, we show how studying ‘language in use’ through this comparative mixed-methods research design allows us to bridge the contributions from discourse and practice in the study of Politics and International Relations.