The Language of Pandemic Leaderships: Mapping Political Rhetoric During the COVID-19 Outbreak.

Abstract

This article maps political rhetoric by national leaders during the COVID‐19 pandemic. We identify and characterize global variations in major rhetorical storylines invoked in publicly available speeches (N = 1201) across a sample of 26 countries. Employing a text analytics or corpus linguistics approach, we show that state heads rhetorically lead their nations by: enforcing systemic interventions, upholding global unity, encouraging communal cooperation, stoking national fervor, and assuring responsive governance. Principal component analysis further shows that country‐level rhetoric is organized along emergent dimensions of cultural cognition: an agency‐structure axis to define the loci of pandemic interventions and a hierarchy‐egalitarianism axis which distinguishes top‐down enforcement from bottom‐up calls for cooperation. Furthermore, we detect a striking contrast between countries featuring populist versus cosmopolitan rhetoric, which diverged in terms of their collective meaning making around leading over versus leading with, as well as their experienced pandemic severity. We conclude with implications for understanding global pandemic leadership in an unequal world and the contributions of mixed‐methods approaches to a generative political psychology in times of crisis. Highlights During a global pandemic, political leaders must adapt their rhetoric to local societal conditions. Our work affirms the importance of political governance that elevates strong institutions while empowering public cooperation, but cautions that these may be most readily enacted in more democratic and economically developed contexts. In poorer, less democratic settings, rhetoric emphasizing accountable governance should be responsive to bottom‐up grassroots efforts in local communities, in contrast to the tightening grip of top‐down militarized policing in states witnessing the opportunistic creep of authoritarianism during a period of societal disorder. Finally, rhetoric where leaders uphold global ideals underscore wider identities of international collaborations in a global crisis, in contrast to more insularizing nationalistic rhetoric.