Viral Politics

Corona, the Lockdown, and the Media investigates media influence on policies to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Bernhagen and Kybelka propose that news reporting on the pandemic pitches human impact against economic consequences of the virus and of restrictive policy measures designed to contain it. They argue that the use of these frames influences governments’ decisions to enact or lift lockdown measures. Using time series data from England, France, and Germany, the authors show that news reporting on COVID-19 was indeed characterized by these media frames. However, there is no evidence of media influence on government policy. Instead, the authors find that anti-pandemic policy decisions were responsive to public opinion in these countries.

Pandemic policies have been the focus of fierce lobbying competition by different social and economic interests. In Viral Lobbying a team of expert authors from across the social and natural sciences analyse patterns in and implications of this ‘viral lobbying’. Based on elite surveys and focus group interviews with selected groups, the book provides new evidence on the lobbying strategies used during the COVID 19 pandemic, as well as the resulting access to and lobbying influence on public policy. The empirical analyses reach across eight European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom), as well as the EU-level. In particular, the book draws on responses from approximately 1,600 interest organisations in two waves of a cross-country survey (in 2020 and 2021, respectively). This quantitative data is supplemented by qualitative evidence from a series of 12 focus groups with organised interests in Ireland, Denmark and the Netherlands conducted in spring 2021.