A Comparative Analysis of Crisis Communication by Governments and Heads of State

 

Funded by the FWF

Together with Lore Hayek and Martin Senn

October 2021 to September 2025

 

In this project, we examine the strategies of communication that governments and heads of state used in televised press conferences to steer their countries through the immediate phase of the COVID-19 crisis through a combination of three analytic decisions: we analyze televised press conferences as the most important means of communication, focus on governments and heads of state as the most important political actors, and select the immediate phase of the COVID-19 crisis as a distinct timeframe.

 

The project seeks to answer two research questions:

1) Which strategies of crisis communication did governments and heads of state choose in the immediate phase of the COVID-19 crisis?

2) Which factors influence the crisis communication strategies of governments and heads of state? It uses a comparative, mixed-methods research design to analyze strategies of crisis communication in 17 OECD countries.