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 enfo

SUBMITTER: Montiel CJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8250800 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature