Swedish exceptionalism, herd immunity and the welfare state: A media analysis of struggles over the nature and legitimacy of the COVID-19 pandemic strategy in Sweden

Anna Olofsson,Katarina Giritli Nygren

doi:10.1177/0011392121990025

Abstract

Compared to many other countries, Sweden has managed the COVID-19 pandemic with no lockdowns, less regulation and more voluntary action expected of citizens and organizations. In this article, the authors explore media representations of national preventative strategies and how they were anchored in broader discourses. The article aims to analyse the development of crisis narratives and struggles over legitimacy during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden. Employing a critical discourse analysis, the authors investigate the editorials and opinion articles in Sweden’s largest morning newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, during the spring of 2020. The authors combine descriptive analyses of the development of the crisis narratives with discursive analyses of conflicting ideologies in the debate. The study indicates that three crisis narratives dominated the debates: health, the economy and democracy. Within and between these narratives, struggles over legitimacy in the handling of COVID-19 were captured in several conflicting perspectives or paradoxes: Swedish exceptionalism versus the world, centralization versus decentralization and herd immunity versus herd humanism.

Highlights

In the early summer of 2020, the Swedish government’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic stood out in comparison to that of other nation-states
Other groups were not debated and defined in the same way, despite the high mortality rates. This reveals which subjectivities became desirable in the crisis narratives and which ones became ‘invisible’, as they were not accounted for in the coverage of the pandemic crises (Giritli Nygren et al, 2020). This contribution analysed the development of crisis narratives and struggles over legitimacy during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden
Employing a critical discourse analysis, we investigated the editorials and debate articles in Sweden’s largest morning newspaper, Dagens Nyheter (DN), during the spring of 2020

Summary

Introduction

In the early summer of 2020, the Swedish government’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic stood out in comparison to that of other nation-states. The argumentation favoured strong political action in support of the economy, and the rhetoric exemplified the response to the pandemic; it emphasized the nation-state as the unit for attributing risks and interventions, which lead the way to centralization, the reaffirmation of national sovereignty and centralized governance (Hannah et al, 2020) In this narrative, worry about the consequences of the pandemic on democracy was expressed as a result of the demand for stronger leadership in the management of the pandemic. The editor-in-chief asked for stronger political leadership on the national level in order to control the pandemic rather than trusting citizens to follow recommendations We interpret this as a paradox, whereby centralization is seen as a solution to the shortcomings of the Swedish strategy, despite the fear that democracy would be weakened under extreme measures. This reveals which subjectivities became desirable in the crisis narratives and which ones became ‘invisible’, as they were not accounted for in the coverage of the pandemic crises (Giritli Nygren et al, 2020)

Conclusions

Findings

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