Reclaiming the Public Sphere in a Global Health Crisis, Vol. 28 - 2021, No. 2
Guest Edited by Hans-Jörg Trenz, Annett Heft, Michael Vaughan and Barbara Pfetsch
Resilience of Public Spheres in a Global Health Crisis
The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted “normal” modes of public sphere functioning and activated an experimental mode of coping, reinventing forms of publicness and communicative exchanges. We conceptualise the social responses triggered by the crisis as particular forms of public sphere resilience and assess the role of digitalisation and digital spaces in the emergence of distinct modes and dynamics of resilience. Four areas of enhanced public sphere experimentation are examined with respect to our conceptualisation: political consumerism, digital modes of solidarity, political protest mobilisation, and news consumption. We discuss overarching features of public sphere resilience across societal sub-spheres and highlight the dynamics and hybridities which structure the emerging public spaces. Resilience practices are accompanied by dynamics of politicisation and depoliticisation coupled with shifting boundaries of publicness and privateness. Our observations likewise reveal the dynamic interplay between resilience and resistance.
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Public Sphere in Crisis Mode: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Influenced Public Discourse and User Behaviour in the Swiss Twitter-sphere
In modern democracies, large societal crises like the COVID-19 pandemic are accompanied by intensified public discourse about which policies and strategies are adequate to fight the crisis. In such times, the public sphere switches to crisis mode with fundamentally different communicative dynamics compared to routinised periods. Data from social media platforms like Twitter offers new possibilities to study such dynamics. However, comprehensive studies on how crises affect discourse in distinct national publics are missing up to now. Based on 1,762,262 tweets referring to COVID-19 written between 1 January and 30 April 2020 by 56,418 validated Swiss users, we illustrate how the lockdown of public life in Switzerland affected the discourse in the Swiss Twitter-sphere. Based on public sphere theories, we identify four crisis-related dimensions for our analysis. We show that the pandemic led to a narrowing of the topic agenda and to a more inwardly oriented public sphere with increased Twitter activity by experts. Furthermore, actors from the social periphery were able to reach the centre of public discourse with their tweets. Overall our study shows how methodological innovation allows us to better connect an empirical analysis with the concept of a public sphere as a communication network.
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Public Sphere and Post-populism in the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Short Life of Depolarisation in Argentina
In this article, we examine whether the COVID-19 pandemic opens opportunities for consensual politics and the reconstruction of a pluralistic public sphere in countries characterised by polarised politics. Our focus is on how the Alberto Fernández administration in Argentina managed the crisis during 2020 and the window of opportunity that the pandemic created for a post-populist, depolarised scenario. Although the government initially tried to pursue consensual policymaking and foregrounded a public health response to the crisis, the prolonged nature of the health crisis, the toll of the pandemic, and the failure of government policies to address multiple aspects of the crisis reactivated political polarisation. The Argentine case helps to understand whether the politics of depolarisation amid the pandemic are possible and sustainable. Even with scientific expertise gaining significant presence, legitimacy and initial consensus, it is insufficient to chart out a path to depolarisation given persistent structural dynamics that foster sharp divisions.
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“Those on the Right Take Chloroquine”: The Illiberal Instrumentalisation of Scientific Debates during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brasil
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Brasilian government has undergone a significant political dispute over the use of hydroxychloroquine as a measure to confront the disease and contested scientific and healthcare organisations findings related to the drug's effectiveness. In this article, we seek to understand the manner in which an illiberal populist government and the supporters thereof refer to scientific discourse during the pandemic, with a focus on the debates on Brasilian far-right networks on Twitter. Using a mixed methodology with statistical methods, social media analysis, natural language processing and qualitative content analysis, this study seeks to investigate which sources and stakeholders were referenced and the narratives that structured the arguments of far-right supporters who defended the use of hydroxychloroquine. The results highlight the use of sources that are ideologically aligned to the right and a reconfiguration of scientific authority that was supported by illiberal values. Among the main discourses, we observed an epistemic challenge with a partisan bias, which led to the scientific authority legitimising some arguments and discrediting others. We also identified the spread of conspiracy theories that reflected the epistemic challenge, in addition to conservative, revivalist and individualistic postures.
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Whose Opinion Is It? Public Debates and Repertoires of Action in Greece During the First Covid-19 Lockdown Period
To what extent do public health crises create unity or polarise the public sphere? We investigate the development and dynamics of the public debate in Greece in light of Covid-19 to detect polarisation within the public sphere. We cover the first wave of the pandemic (March-May 2020), assessing reactions to government measures. In times of crises, the public looks for shortcuts in the media to assess the overabundance of information and digest the complexity of a crisis. Hence, people look at opinion leaders for guidance or to reinforce their own views. To assess the formation of the public debate and public responses we look at the cues the public receives via the media. Through a content analysis of editorial pieces in Greek newspapers we code references to government responses, the public response or the responsibility of fellow citizens, and the role of experts in providing professional advice to the government and guidance to society. The differential of positive and negative references reflects and determines a polarised debate that triggers public mobilisation and engagement with specific repertoires of action. The findings assist in understanding the adherence to government guidance by the public and the passive reception or contestation of measures.
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Online Hate Speech and the Radical Right in Times of Pandemic: The Italian and English Cases
Social media is considered a particularly conducive arena for hate speech, a form of communication often linked to the radical right. The goal of this study is to offer an empirical contribution that comparatively explores the presence and features of hate speech in the social media discourse of the radical right (leaders and parties) in Italy and the UK during the first year of the pandemic. This mixed-methods study analyses 21,360 tweets using wordcloud analysis (to conceptually map the social media discourse of the radical right and mainstream parties), topic modelling (to identify the main topics of the radical right’s tweets and how they relate to Covid-19) and formalised content analysis (to better understand how hate speech is related to the virus). We find that radical right leaders have managed to bring exclusion-oriented issues to the agenda at this time of crisis, albeit in different ways, by emphasising different understandings of in-groups and out-groups in relation to Covid-19.
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Conspiracy Theories and the Crisis of the Public Sphere: COVID-19 in Slovenia
This paper examines the rise of conspiracy theories amidst the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic. Conspiracy theories have been a historic sojourner in Western modern societies, stretching from witch hunts in early modern Europe to the 1950s anti-communist witch hunt of the McCarthy era in the U.S. During the COVID-19 health crisis, however, the conspiracy theories have gained a fresh impetus, travelling globally and forming diverse communities of believers. Moreover, once a predominantly fringe phenomenon, at present, they have moved to the centre of the public debate, deliberating on the reliability of scientific evidence as well as the legitimacy of lockdowns and other public health measures. This makes the COVID-19 conspiracy believers an integral part of the public sphere where, in open conflict with expert knowledge and science, they act as a “pandemic counter-public.” I observe the rise of this pandemic counter-public in the context of the current political crisis in Slovenia, arguing that post-socialist legacies of democratic protest bear a vital role in contesting the conspiracy groups, as well as maintaining the resilience of the liberal democratic ideals of responsible citizenship and common good.
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