Populist Discourses on COVID-19 in the Global South (POP-DISC)
Final Report Abstract
The project ‘Populist Discourses on COVID-19 in the Global South (POP-DISC)’ aimed to make a first contribution towards a theorization and systematic empirical analysis of the impact of populism in the context of COVID-19. It did so by focusing on populist governments’ discourses on the pandemic, asking the following questions: RQ1: Which narratives shape the official discourse on the pandemic in countries governed by populists? RQ2: How are these narratives received, reproduced or contested by the wider public, including on social media? POP-DISC took a theory-led explorative approach, assessing to what extent the constitutive elements of populism (anti-elitism and people-centrism, involving an often exclusionary definition of the ‘people’) were reflected in discourses on the pandemic. The empirical analysis focused on five countries in different regions of the Global South with populist governments: Brazil, India, Israel, Mexico, and Turkey. The analysis focused both on official government narratives on the pandemic as well as on the reception, reproduction or contestation of such narratives among the larger public, with a particular focus on social media. Our analysis revealed that the populists under scrutiny used the global crisis situation as a window of opportunity for political mobilization. What was striking, was the observed variation in their mobilization patterns. Three findings stand out: the variance in the use of anti-elitism or people-centrism in populist narratives, the emphasis on crisis management performance, and the use of narratives on personalized leadership. Only Bolsonaro adopted narratives that downplayed the severity of the pandemic and blamed the ‘elite’. While this does not imply that Bolsonaro’s pandemic rhetoric was completely void of people-centric references, the amount of anti-elitist narratives we found during the analysis is astonishing. In criticizing the ‘bad elite’, identified with subnational decision makers trying to implement measures to fight the pandemic, who were blamed for endangering the livelihoods of poor Brazilians affected by the economic consequences of lockdowns and other measures, Bolsonaro conformed to the playbook of ‘medical populism’. In contrast, the governments in Israel, India, Mexico, and Turkey focused strongly on promoting people-centrism. Instead of conjuring up conspiracy theories and of blaming obscure elites for the crisis, they emphasized the people-centric component of populism and tried to mobilize support by highlighting the strength of the people. None of those governments downplayed the severity of the pandemic or the importance of a scientific approach and of adequate measures to fight it – other than many populist actors in Europe, for example. Anti-elitism was present in some of these governments’ narratives on the pandemic, like in Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO)’s blaming of past governments for not having built up the health system adequately, but overall, people-centrism prevailed. A common element across all cases was the focus on performance narratives. All governments tried to present their policies as successful and to celebrate their crisis performance – regardless of actual results. In some cases, they even claimed to be doing ‘better than the rest’ of the world and especially of the industrialized countries of the ‘West’. An international component implicitly challenging the actors at the core of the muchcriticized ‘liberal international order’ was therefore an inherent part of the narratives of some of the governments analyzed. Finally, another common theme was the emphasis on the role of the populist leaders as saviors able to do the right things in the name of the people and for the people. These leadership narratives had different case-specific features – such as Netanyahu’s references to the past of the Jewish people or to AMLO’s calls for responsible individual behavior. Regarding the reception, reproduction or contestation of these government narratives on social media (YouTube, Twitter and Facebook), we further found out that the degree of polarization of the debate differed between the five countries under scrutiny, also depending on how polarized each society already was when the pandemic broke out. Moreover, the kind of diffusion of the narratives and the ways in which they were discussed also differed between the various social media platforms, with Facebook providing a platform for oftentimes rather assertive comments, YouTube frequently being used by government supporters to bolster ‘their leaders’’ claims, and Twitter sometimes being used to engage in a more constructive manner with the government narratives.
Publications
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Patterns of populist mobilization: comparing narratives on COVID-19 in the global South. International Affairs, 99(1), 337-355.
Belder, F.; Destradi, S.; Gurol, J.; Rodríguez, C. Heras; Kölük, M.; Martins, J.; Rogel, S. & Swarati, S.
