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“Do as I say but not as I do”: Influence of political leaders’ populist communication styles on public adherence in a crisis using the global case of COVID-19 movement restrictions

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posted on 2023-05-16, 06:31 authored by Libo Liu, Kristijan MirkovskiKristijan Mirkovski, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Quan Vu
This paper explores the influence of political leaders' populist communication styles on public adherence to government policies regarding COVID-19 containment. We adopt a mixed-methods approach that combines: theory building with a nested multicase study design for Study 1 and an empirical study in a natural setting for Study 2. Based on the results from Studies 1 and 2, we develop two propositions that we further explain theoretically: (P1) countries with political leaders associated with engaging or intimate populist communication styles (i.e., the UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and Ireland) exhibit better public adherence to their governments' COVID-19 movement restrictions than do countries with political leaders associated with communication styles that combine the champion of the people and engaging styles (i.e., the US); (P2) the country whose political leader is associated with a combination of engaging and intimate populist communication styles (i.e., Singapore) exhibits better public adherence to the government's COVID-19 movement restrictions than do countries whose political leaders adopted solely engaging or solely intimate styles, namely, the UK, Canada, Australia, and Ireland. This paper contributes to the research on political leadership in crises and populist political communication.

History

Journal

Data and Information Management

Article number

100039

Pagination

1-19

Location

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

ISSN

2543-9251

eISSN

2543-9251

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Publisher

Elsevier

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