Reclaiming the Public Sphere in a Global Health Crisis 2, Vol. 28 - 2021, No. 3
Guest Edited by Barbara Pfetsch, Michael Vaughan, Hans-Jörg Trenz and Annett Heft
The Resilience of Pandemic Digital Deliberation: An Analysis of Online Synchronous Forums
Quality deliberation is essential for societies to address the challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic effectively and legitimately. Critics of deliberative and participatory democracy are highly skeptical that most citizens can engage with such complex issues in good circumstances and these are far from ideal circumstances. The need for rapid action and decision-making is a challenge for inclusivity and quality of deliberation. Additionally, policy responses to the virus need to be even more co-ordinated than usual, which intensifies their complexity. The digitalisation of the public sphere may be seen as a further challenge to deliberating. Furthermore, these are stressful and emotional times, making a considered judgement on these issues potentially challenging. We employ a modified version of the Discourse Quality Index to assess the deliberative quality in two facilitated synchronous digital platforms to consider aspects of data use in light of COVID 19. Our study is the first to perform a comprehensive, systematic and in-depth analysis of the deliberative capacity of citizens in a pandemic. Our evidence indicates that deliberation can be resilient in a crisis. The findings will have relevance to those interested in pandemic democracy, deliberative democracy in a crisis, data use and digital public spheres.
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Community Media in a Pandemic: Facilitating Local Communication Collective Resilience and Transitions to Virtual Public Life in the U.S.
This article examines how US community media organisations anchored to public, educational and government (PEG) cable channels facilitated community resilience during the 2020 pandemic. We find evidence that they served as active “meso-agents” (institutional actors) in local communication networks. Some 230 completed survey responses and 10 open-ended interviews with PEG staffers demonstrated that access media commonly performed essential functions including official and community communication and teacher training in new virtual platforms; providing news, especially coordinating official information; and providing “contactless community,” with virtual versions of ritual occasions. These creative responses also suggest new ways to address “news deserts” in the US, if chronic problems with spotty broadband, underfunding of PEG services and lack of federal incentives can be addressed.
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Design Manufacture and Save. Coronavirus Makers During the COVID-19 Crisis in Spain
This research analyses the Coronavirus Makers in Spain, focusing on three characteristics: the hybrid organisation, the use of technologies, and the cultural impact. To do so, we carried out a multimodal ethnography (Dicks, Bella, Bambo Soyinka, and Amanda Coffey. 2006. “Multimodal Ethnography.” Qualitative Research 6 (1): 77–96) from March to June 2020, during the first wave of the COVID-19. Coronavirus Makers’ activity can be framed as a pandemic movement, enhancing expressions of solidarity, social mobilisation, and resilience. The decentralised collective work and the anti-commercial logic (i.e. promoting open designs and protocols) tackled the immediate shortage of medical materials and structural deficits in health services. This network embraced the Spanish legacy of social mobilisation, as during the 15M, yet it presents actions that are circumscribed to the pandemic context and deserve further attention.
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Paradoxes of Reactance During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Social-psychological Perspective
This study aims to explain the dynamics of compliance towards the measures to contain the coronavirus in 2020 by drawing on the theory of psychological reactance. We discuss our findings in a model that distinguishes between catalysts and buffers of reactance arousal on an individual level and hypothesises how these may lead to compliant or resistant behaviour as acts of resilience in the public sphere. In an online survey (N = 766, May 2020, Germany), we found that reactance arousal towards the restrictions to contain the coronavirus depended on the individual assessment of the limitations of freedom. Data suggest that health related fear buffers reactance arousal, whereas surprisingly, sorrow and cognitive dissonance amplify it. Anger and a critical political attitude towards the government correlate positively with the mobilising power of reactance. We argue that these are essential elements that push individual reactance arousal over the threshold into the public sphere, where it serves to shove resilience towards resistance. Our study expands this essential social-psychological theory to be a driver not only in the individual but also in public behaviour, opening a new perspective on the tipping point between resilience and resistance in the public sphere during this crisis and beyond.
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Beliefs Attitudes and Communicative Practices of Opponents and Supporters of COVID-19 Containment Policies: A Qualitative Case Study from Germany
In many countries, intense political contestation unfolded around the question of how Sars-CoV-2 should be contained. In this case study, I try to understand why members of the German public came to vastly differing judgements on the containment policies. In summer 2020, I conducted 48 semi-structured interviews to investigate respondents’ belief systems, attitude structures, and communicative practices. I found that disparate policy preferences were partly based on incompatible interpretations of the crisis and went hand in hand with deep institutional mistrust between strict opponents. Stereotypes about supporters and opponents had formed, and people avoided discussions with opposing camps. However, my data also suggest that moderate opponents and supporters overlapped in their criticism of anxiety-inducing media coverage and fuzzy governmental communication. No fully-fledged social identities had formed, and respondents were forcibly exposed to other opinions in their close personal networks. Altogether, my study extends the knowledge of political polarisation around COVID-19 by unravelling the interpretations and mechanisms that underlie disparate policy preferences during the pandemic.
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Polarisation and Silencing Others During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Germany: An Experimental Study Using Algorithmically Curated Online Environments
In 2020, societies debated the use of government restrictions on public life to stem the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these debates took place online. The Internet enables people to come into contact with like-minded content. Algorithms based on collaborative filtering can contribute to this process and might lead to homogenous like-minded online environments that contribute to a polarisation of society. This article therefore examines the effects of (1) like-minded versus opposing online environments, which were (2) randomly versus algorithmically curated. Data from a between-subject experiment embedded in a two-wave panel survey of German citizens (n = 318) show that attitude polarisation as well as affective polarisation are largely independent of exposure to different online environments. Moreover, the results indicate that polarised attitudes of supporters and opponents of the COVID-19-related restrictions relate to varying degrees of beliefs in the importance of silencing people with opposing opinions: While supporters’ polarised attitudes are positively related to the belief in the importance of silencing others, opponents’ polarised attitudes are rather negatively related to such beliefs.
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