Populist Communication during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Up next at IAMCR 2023 is Sabina Mihelj, focussing on populist communication about the COVID-19 pandemic, across the US, Poland, Serbia, and Brazil. Such research is critical given the real potential (and genuine experience) of populists assuming positions of political leadership (as in the US or Brazil) and actively contradicting the health advice of pandemic experts.

Populist divides between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, and promotes the rule of charismatic, usually male, leaders; it promotes illiberalism, not least also through the skilful use of social media; and this produces populist challenges to expert authority that can fall on fertile grounds, especially in a crisis context.

The present project conducted a comparative analysis of the pandemic communication cycle, covering aspects of health crisis communication, media policy, media coverage, public attitudes, and pandemic politics. Health crisis communication was examined through elite interviews and public records analysis: this showed attempts by populist politicians to control communication and in the process replace public experts (demonstrating the strongman aspects of populism), but the dynamics were different across the countries – in the US and Brazil, leaders sought to dominate communication from the start; in Poland and Serbia politicised the health response only at a later stage when it became politically expedient to downplay or contradict expert advice.

Media policy was analysed through policy analysis, interviews, and public records: here, freedom of information was reduced, and journalistic work was restricted or attacked while public media funding was distributed unevenly.

Public attitudes and news consumption habits were studied through surveys: populist followers showed less trust in the media and political elites, and this also had impacts on their following of health advice. Populism this makes it less likely for politicians to set divisions aside in crisis, and increases resistance to scientific guidance as well as vulnerability to disinformation. These patterns may well extend beyond the narrow field of health communication, and to other forms of crisis (the global warming crisis is an obvious example here).