Poster #74 - Leadership Under Fire: Analyzing Political Leaders' Tactics in COVID-19 Briefings

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

In times of crises, political leaders and other key stakeholders are expected to communicate effectively with community members to provide the necessary information to restore a state of normalcy and ensure public safety (Jong, 2017). However, as the recent COVID-19 pandemic illustrated, different political leaders adopted approaches with varying levels of success in  informing the public of the severity of the issue and enforcing public safety measures like mask mandates (Watkins & Clevenger, 2021), leading to  differing COVID case rates. This research asks the question, “How do stakeholder tactics used by US governors during public briefings on COVID-19 influence the development of public safety mandates and affect the public’s response to such mandates?” 

We plan to study stakeholder tactics that include the speaker’s linguistic competency (i.e. choices of phrasing), medium and visual cues, the involvement of other key stakeholders and overall consistency in tactics. To conduct this research, we plan to collect data from each US governor’s public briefings on COVID-19 at set times between April and October 2020 following the model used by Jensen et al (2023). The data focuses on the type of information presented by the governor (looking at a transcript of the speech) and the context of the speech. We focused on the two weeks preceding opinion surveys conducted between April 1 and October 1, 2020 to provide opportunities to examine the perceptions of community members in response to the governor’s actions. We also plan on utilizing semi-supervised machine learning pattern learning to explore and categorize our findings.

Author

• Ashlee Frandell
  Presenting Author