COVID-19 Crisis: Government's (Dis)Trust in the People and Pitfalls of Liberal Democracies

Authors

  • Marija Sniečkutė University of Amsterdam
  • Inga Gaižauskatė Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1285/i20356609v14i1p152

Keywords:

Citizens, COVID-19 crisis, democracy, discourse analysis, political trust

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis highlighted the issue of trust in European democracies. Governments had to both undertake (unprecedented) restrictive measures to manage the spread of COVID-19 and to rely on citizens' willingness to adhere to these measures. Scientific works on political trust generally focus on people's trust in government and stress its centrality during the crisis. Public opinion surveys, conducted during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, reported fluctuating levels of people's trust in national governments. However, it is as important to ask how government constructs trust, including in its own people. In the article, we aim to focus on the latter aspect of political trust in order to highlight the role of trust in such crises as pandemic, and draw evaluative implications for democratic arrangements. Using discourse analysis, we look at how the Prime Ministers (PMs) of three European countries (Hungary, Lithuania, and the Netherlands) articulated (dis)trust as well as constructed images of "Us" in their public speeches informing respective societies about the COVID-19 situation. In PMs' speeches (dis)trust is articulated along a "trust-control" continuum, and we identified distinctive patterns of the "Us" vs. "Them" construction.

Author Biographies

Marija Sniečkutė, University of Amsterdam

Marija Sniečkutė, European studies, University of Amsterdam, Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam, the Netherlands, m.snieckute@uva.nl. She is a PhD Researcher at the department of European Studies, University of Amsterdam, and has recently worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Groningen for the project EXCEPTIUS: Exceptional powers in time of Sars-CoV crisis. She has an academic background in Argumentation and Philosophy (University of Amsterdam), Sociology and Criminology (Vilnius University). Sniečkutė is an affiliate of the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies and a member of the Huizinga Institute. Her research focuses on nationalism, populism, political communication, cultural history, and discourse analysis. Lately, she wrote articles for the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (2018) and a chapter “Values in Populism and Argumentative Counter-Strategies: the Case of Viktor Orbán” in Vox Populi: Populism as a Rhetorical and Democratic Challenge (2020).

Inga Gaižauskatė, Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences

Inga Gaižauskatė, A. Goštauto str. 9, LT-01108, Vilnius, Lithuania, inga.gaizauskaite@lstc.lt. She is is a sociologist, currently working as a Junior Researcher in the Institute of Sociology at the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, Lithuania. Her main areas of research interests include democratization, social and political trust, intergenerational relationships as well as developments of social research methodology. She is a co-author of two handbooks on research methodology for university students and a number of scientific publications in the fields of her research interests. Since 2018, she is a board member of International Sociological Association’s RC33 “Logic and Methodology in Sociology”. Gaižauskaitė is also engaged as a promoter of academic integrity and currently is a board member of European Network for Academic Integrity (ENAI).

 

 

 

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Published

24-06-2021

Issue

Vol. 14, No. 1 (2021). Special Issue on: "Covid-19 and the Structural Crisis of Liberal Democracies"

Section

Special Issue

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