Social Psychology Commons^™

The Language Of Pandemic Leaderships: Mapping Political Rhetoric During The Covid-19 Outbreak, Cristina J. Montiel, Joshua Uyheng, Erwine Dela Paz

Psychology Department Faculty Publications

This paper 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 …