Publication
Linking crises: Connections between climate change and COVID-19 during American, Canadian, Dutch, and Lithuanian national elections (2020-2021)
The occurrence of a new crisis can inspire a re-evaluation of responses to older or other contemporary crises. The aim of this research is to understand how such processes operate for the combination of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic within 4 countries.
- Author
- Thijs van Dooremalen, Marija Sniečkutė, Inga Gaižauskaitė, Anne Lachance
- Date
- 22 August 2024
- Links
- Sage Journals
This article introduces the concept of 'linking crises' which enables capturing the direct connections that are drawn between the COVID-19 crisis and the crisis of climate change. The researchers studied these crisis link-ages for four national elections that took place within North America and Europe at various time points of the heydays of the COVID-19 pandemic: Lithuania, the United States, the Netherlands, and Canada. From literature on the meaning-making of social and political life four relevant dimensions of crises linking are derived.
By making use of a comparative content analysis, using both quantitative and qualitative text analysis methods to study political election manifestos, many cross-national similarities are found in the ways the two crises were linked with each other. The research concludes that leftist parties more often linked both crises with each other than rightist ones. Additionally, in all countries the issue of the economy was highly present in the crises linking, and issues such as the environment and foreign policy also came up frequently in each of them. The results of the research contradict a dominant idea in the literature on crisis meaning-making, according to which crisis responses generally differ a lot between nation-states. Rather, they suggest that phenomena which drive cross-national parity such as party idea diffusion and ideology effects have been significantly at play for the four cases.