Government Crisis Communication and the Coronavirus Pandemic: Risk Narratives and Policy Responses in Western Europe

Governments across western Europe have come up with significantly different policy responses to the potentially existential challenges that the coronavirus pandemic poses to their peoples. In terms of public policy, the pandemic poses a quintessential problem of risk assessment, “where knowledge is uncertain and consent is contested”(Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982:6). In this paper, we examine the differences in how those policy responses were communicated to the public using a lens of risk narratives. These narratives could be understood as sense-making activities that reflected a given assessment of the threat, ways of framing and legitimising political decisions and practices, and also ways of providing “instructive information” (Liu et al 2020) to shape public behavior (Springston et al 2009). The paper compares and contrasts the official narratives developed by governments across Western Europe in their crisis communication, analysing them in the light of the stringency and promptness of the policy responses adopted in the countries considered. Taking into account that threats typically “generate a stronger public response when they are framed in groups rather than individual terms” (Lunn et al 2020), we discuss three hypotheses: Immediate policy responses were less stringent when a) in their communication, political leaders underestimated or underplayed the likelihood of damage that the pandemic would cause; b) political leaders emphasised the economic rather than the human costs of the pandemic; c) the threat was framed more narrowly i.e. the disease would affect “only” certain sub-groups severely rather than society as a whole. The paper is organised in three sections. First, we outline the theoretical and methodological framework. Second, we discuss our hypotheses by surveying the narratives, timeliness and stringency of the responses in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, UK, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Finland, Sweden, conducting a content analysis of official documents and public speeches made by heads of government in february-march 2020. Third, we develop two in-depth case studies offering a more nuanced analysis of risk narratives and corresponding policy responses to the crisis. References Douglas, M. and Wildavsky, A. (1982) Risk and Culture. An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Liu, B. F. Irina A. Iles & Emina Herovic (2020) Leadership under Fire: How Governments Manage Crisis Communication, Communication Studies, 71:1, 128-147, DOI: 10.1080/10510974.2019.1683593 Lunn, P. D., Belton, C. A., Lavin, C., McGowan, F. P., Timmons, S., & Robertson, D. A. (2020) Using behavioural science to help fight the coronavirus. Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, 3:1, 1-15 DOI: 10.30636/jbpa.31.147 Springston, J. K., Avery, E. J. and Salot, L. M. (2009) Influence theories: rhetorical, persuasion, and informational. In R. L. Heath and H. D. O'Hair (eds) Handbook of risk and crisis communication. - New York, NY [u.a.] : Routledge, ISBN 978-0-8058-5778-8. p. 268-284.