How political parties frame the Covid crisis in their communication: Evidence from Twitter

The Covid crisis constituted an enormous challenge for political systems around the world. Beyond combatting the crisis, political actors had to learn to make sense of the crisis in terms of their existing preferences and platforms and to shape their political communication accordingly. In seeking to understand parties’ communicative responses to the Covid crisis, we ask whether political actors have emphasized the health aspects of the crisis or whether they have viewed Covid through the lens of their conventional policy agendas. To study this question, we analyze more than 65,000 Covid-related tweets by German party organizations and individual MPs using state-of-the-art Bidirectional Encoder Representations of Transformers (BERT) techniques (ParlBERT, Klamm, et al. 2022). Our results indicate that while health plays an important role in parties’ social media communication, political actors see the Covid crisis through a partisan lens and frame discussions accordingly. For example, the populist right-wing AfD addresses the Covid crisis much more in terms of a civil rights issue, while the centre-left SPD and the left-wing Linke emphasize social and macroeconomic aspects. Comparing the communication of individual MPs with party accounts, we find that differences between party accounts are more pronounced than between MPs. Moreover, we provide evidence for differences in the framing of the Covid crisis across individual characteristics such as age and mandate type.