Policy narratives, localisation, and public justification: responses to COVID-19

Abstract

Globally, infection and death rates from COVID-19 vary dramatically. While states had broadly the same information about the virus at the start of the crisis, responses were very different. What caused such disparity in policy actions and outcomes? While various factors may account for divergent responses, we highlight the importance of narratives employed by key policy actors. First, we review the literature on policy narratives. We suggest it can be usefully augmented with consideration of localisation and public justification. We apply this augmented framework using case studies of Germany and the United Kingdom. Chancellor Angela Merkel's narrative was more successful at persuading German citizens to embrace government policies to counter COVID-19 than was Prime Minister Boris Johnson's in the United Kingdom. This difference held important implications for policy outcomes in each country. We conclude by discussing the benefits of this augmented approach to analysis of policy narratives.

The self-perpetuation of the promise of care robots

“…They 'constitute collective frames for understanding that integrate a group's knowledge structures, place events in causal order, serve as mnemonics, [and] permit inferential reasoning' , thus permitting 'people to organise their experiences […] in ways that facilitate prediction, comprehension and control' (Currie & Brown, 2003:564−65). The sensemaking capacity of shared narratives has been extensively studied for organisations (Boje, 1991;Brown, Stacey & Nandhakumar, 2008;Currie & Brown, 2003;Meyer, 2019;Patriotta, 2003;Vaara, Sonenshein & Boje, 2016) but also for other social settings such as policy processes (Boswell, 2013;Jones, McBeth & Shanahan, 2014;Mintrom, Rublee, Bonotti & Zech, 2021;Shanahan, McBeth & Hathaway, 2011) or innovation processes (Bartel & Garud, 2009;Hermwille, 2016;Luederitz, Abson, Audet & Lang, 2017).…”

“…Polkinghorne, 1988). Presenting and perceiving the plot as an inevitable course of events, as a plausible description of a development or as commonsense knowledge is the way in which narratives are deployed to select and institutionalise meanings and to legitimise and justify courses of action (Patriotta, 2003:351;Mintrom, Rublee, Bonotti & Zech, 2021).…”

Reviewing the Reproduction Number R in Covid-19 Models

“…On 16 April 2020, Angela Merkel famously explained in a video interview that R needed to be kept under 1.1, otherwise hospitals would be overwhelmed (Mahase 2021;Adam 2020;Hyde 2021). It has been argued that Merkel's explanation involving R can also be seen as a powerful narrative-a cognitive-rhetorical device-which helped the implementation of mitigation strategies in Germany at that time (Mintrom et al 2021).…”

Post-Covid-19 Recovery and Resiliencebuilding in the Outermost Regions of the European Union: Towards a New European Strategy

“…They refer to several areas of particular relevance to the outermost regions, that is, "customs and trade policies, fiscal policy, free zones, agriculture and fisheries policies, conditions for supply of raw materials and essential consumer goods, State aids and conditions of access to structural funds and to horizontal Union programmes". 23 Such targeted measures are fully aligned with the Union legal order, do not lead to discriminatory practices towards other EU regions, and contribute to even economic, social, and territorial development of the EU as a whole.…”