Sustainable knowledge and emergency management as challenges of political culture: Public responses to covid-19 in Finland and Sweden

The ongoing Covid19 pandemic brings forth today’s challenges of providing sustainable knowledge and emergency management regarding both factual and strategic realities of political life. The political cultures and cleavages underlying national strategies have seldom been exposed to such a vividly comparative extent as during the Covid-19 crisis in providing clear-cut, national responses of specific policy – be it social, political or economic action. As we have seen these actions clearly differ according to political beliefs and national institutions that are independent from the factual and global threat they are to solve. In order to rapidly limit the number of citizens becoming victims of the pandemic, authorities have had to take drastic action based on their national policy arsenal as the governance tools readily available in the context of their respective political culture. Accordingly, we are watching quite a rare and politically exposing scenario of how and which governance tools each nation reach out for in this hasty call for a strategy perceived as the appropriate balance between the obvious ends to save lives and the nationally acceptable extent of measures taken. In this paper, we will explore how Nordic societies are reacting to the pandemic, Sweden standing out as an exception to the orderly Nordic rule of public welfare. In Sweden, the authority of the state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell took the initial forefront in the battle against the pandemic while in e.g. Finland, democratic governance has involved executive politicians such as government ministers in alliance with medical experts. Part of the explanation to these Nordic differences has certainly to do with e.g. the autonomy of regional and local authorities in relation to ministerial powers and decision-making modalities, but these do not explain everything. We will explore the role of public beliefs in, and adherence to, policy that in few crises has proven so crucial for successful outcomes, but in a similar vein the consensus and legitimacy of public institutions to execute the measures have equal crosscutting weight. Accordingly, we argue that the underlying values, rhetoric and cleavages as in the political culture of both institutional and public discourse play a critical role in determining conditions for sustainable knowledge and outcomes of emergency management. We will use relevant opinion surveys to map the interplay between the citizens’ and the political elites’ perceptions of available governance tools in the Finnish and Swedish cases, thus specifying the conversion rates of turning political capital into effective policy measures.