Sober Science or Fiery Politics? – An Analysis of Public Crisis Communication on the COVID-19 Lockdowns in Germany

While much work has looked at how governments responded to the Corona pandemic, what actions they took, how they legitimized them and how this affected public confidence, little consideration has been given to how political actors have used COVID-19 to position themselves in public discourse. Did they put their partisan goals and political competition on the back burner and rely to a large extent on the opinion of the scientific community? Or was Corona used as a highly salient political issue to gain political capital out of the crisis? To shed light on these questions, this paper examines the discourse surrounding both ‘hard’ lockdown decisions in Germany by analyzing the public coverage of two daily newspapers. By means of discourse network analyses, the central actors and concepts of the public discourse are revealed in a first step. The discourse networks show that the public discourse surrounding the lockdown decisions was primarily driven by political actors. Therefore, in a second step, this paper asks about relevant factors influencing the centrality of political actors in public discourse. Based on known assumptions about party-political competition in the federal state of Germany, a linear regression is being performed to identify factors that have a significant influence on the centrality of political actors in the discourse. Participation in the executive branch in the Länder and federal level as well as a special position in inter- and intra party competition emerge as central factors influencing the discourse centrality of actors in public crisis communication on Corona lockdowns. Of particular interest is the finding that the greatest influence comes from actors in the executive at the Länder level.