Driving citizen engagement through Twitter: The case of COVID-19 vaccination drive in India

Effective crisis communication is essential to efficiently handle the uncertainty and anxiousness of citizens during the COVID-19 crisis. Government Twitter handles are an excellent platform for faster information dissemination and engaging citizens. While most government ministries actively use Twitter, limited attention is given to its modus operandi. Using data retrieved from the official Twitter handle of 'The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare' (MOHFW) of India, the current study examines the effect of the content characteristics, including content type and media type, on citizen engagement measured as tweet likes and retweets. The findings are based on 3742 tweets from MOHFW, recording more than 4.06 million likes and 1.23 million retweets over the initial six months of the largest COVID-19 vaccination drive. Results show that content-sharing guidance for stakeholders gained the maximum engagement, while the latest news about the COVID-19 crisis resulted in the least engagement. Photos gained maximum engagement, while statuses resulted in the least engagement. The results illuminate the textual features of the government's Twitter communication and will enable policymakers to manage their social media content strategy diligently.     

Tracing leadership: the ECB’s ‘whatever it takes’ and Germany in the Ukraine crisis

Abstract

Political scientists face problems when assessing a leader’s impact: how can we know that a policy outcome or institutional change is caused by leadership? This article argues that in addition to relying on comparisons and counterfactuals, we need to trace the causal mechanisms by which leadership affects outcomes. Therefore, the article proposes a way to trace leadership and applies it to two cases of EU crisis management: the European Central Bank’s role in announcing Outright Monetary Transactions in the eurozone crisis, and Germany’s role in shaping the EU’s response to the Ukraine crisis. Systematic process-tracing shows that both actors provided leadership ‘by default’. However, while the ECB had to combine the provision of knowledge with unilateral action in order to overcome the eurozone crisis, Germany could use manifold bargaining-based strategies and thus became the EU’s de facto agenda setter and main representative in managing the Ukraine crisis.     

Public Leadership in Times of Crisis: Mission Impossible?

Crisis management (prevention, preparedness, response, and reconstruction) is a tough task for political and bureaucratic leaders. This article documents the persistent tensions between the expectations and realities of crisis leadership. It explores the popular notion that crises provide key opportunities for reform. The very occurrence of a crisis is then thought to expose the status quo as problematic, making it easier to gain momentum for alternative policies and institutions. We argue that the opportunities for reform in the wake of crisis are smaller than often thought. The prime reason is that the requisites of crisis leadership are at odds with the requirements of effective reform.     

What Happened to Queensland's Disaster Management Arrangements?: From ‘Global Best Practice’ to ‘Unsustainable’ in 3 Years

The Queensland Police and Community Safety Review (PACSR) 2013 headed by Mick Keelty was tasked by the Queensland government to examine the State's emergency management practices and processes. Commissioned before any crisis, the PACSR was still collecting evidence when extensive flooding occurred across many regional centres of Queensland in 2013. It was the subsequent management of this event, and selected evidence from earlier inquiries that underpinned many of the findings in the final PACSR report. Keelty recommended institutional and organizational restructuring that included the abolition of a department, and the tasking of the fire and rescue service with additional oversight and audit functions. PACSR argued too much emphasis was placed on relationships, which made disaster management in Queensland potentially unsustainable in the longer term. Some of the findings replicated those of earlier inquiries (O'Sullivan 2009; QFCI 2012), including the apparent reluctance by police to implement communications systems that are interoperable with other emergency agencies. This reluctance to embrace new technologies indicates institutional and cultural barriers to reform. Despite this, the Police and Fire and Rescue services have been given additional responsibilities by the Newman government, based on Keelty's recommendations. PACSR did not appear to evaluate some of the best practice aspects of the 2010–2011 flooding event, whereas some suggest the report had a predetermined element to it (Byrne 2014). In finding that too much emphasis was placed on informal relationships and networks in 2013, and concentrating on structural reforms instead, this paper argues that the PACSR discounted many features that current crisis literature notes as important for a successful disaster management response.     

The myth of German hegemony in the euro area revisited

Abstract

This paper contributes to the scholarly debate on hegemony and leadership in international relations and elaborates on an analytical framework to assess the nature, scope, functions and causal mechanisms of hegemonic and non-hegemonic leadership in general terms. Based on this framework, it takes issue with the interpretation of Germany’s role during the euro area crisis as being a hegemonic one. Discussing the concepts of hegemony, leadership and dominance, it argues that Germany proved dominant during the euro area crisis on selected issues, mainly using its veto power. On other issues, Berlin provided non-hegemonic leadership, more often than not asymmetric co-leadership shared with France. It did not play the role of a hegemon, however, lacking the resources and being unable to shape decisively the economic constitution of the euro area along the lines of its core preferences.     

Crisis Navigation: Lessons from History for the Crisis Manager in Chief

As fundamental tests of presidential leadership and organizational capacity, crises can make or break an administration. This article presents a conceptual analysis of what makes any crisis situation challenging to deal with, and it develops a set of analytical steps that can help crisis managers diagnose particular crisis situations they might face. The proposed crisis navigation framework brings together case research studies and theories of organizational processes, so that those assuming responsibility for steering the government and society through crises—including the Obama administration—have a useful point of entry into the growing crisis management literature.     

Learning from the Katrina Crisis: A Global and International Perspective with Implications for Future Crisis Management

The study of crisis and emergency management—or mismanagement—during Hurricane Katrina will continue to proliferate in the near future. This article presents a global and international perspective on Katrina as a case of "grand failure" in crisis and emergency management, with lessons and implications for future crisis management. Benefiting from empirical data collected from international interviews, the essay presents a theoretical analysis of emergency governance and crisis management, discusses a detailed global perspective on Katrina crisis management as "management and leadership crisis," offers a number of key lessons learned from Katrina, and draws policy and administrative recommendations for future crisis and emergency management through a theory of "surprise management" that is adaptive, collaborative, and citizen engaging and draws on chaos and complexity theories to cope with hyper-uncertainties and unknowns.     

The contested nature of political leadership in the European Union: conceptual and methodological cross-fertilisation

Abstract

European leaders have struggled to find common responses to the polycrisis the EU is facing. This crisis of leadership makes it urgent that scholars provide a better understanding of the role and impact of leadership in EU politics and policy making. This article prepares the ground for a collection of contributions that addresses this need by strengthening old and building new bridges between the academic domains of European studies and leadership studies. It opens with a discussion of the contested concept of leadership in the context of the European polity and politics, challenging the conventional view that leadership is necessarily a matter of hierarchy. Moreover, it argues that rather than leaderless, the EU is an intensely ‘leaderful’ polity. Subsequently, this introduction identifies four key debates in contemporary EU leadership research and discusses the value and insights the contributions in this special issue bring to these debates.     

Germany and the Eurozone Crisis: Between Hegemony and Domestic Politics

This paper explores Germany’s centrality to the outcome of the eurozone crisis. It argues that the eurozone crisis has led Germany’s ordo-liberal principles to trump its other longstanding commitment – i.e. to European integration. These two principles are explored in order then to shed light on how they have played out during the crisis. German centrality has created high expectations for it to provide leadership. Exploring hegemony conceptually and in practice, it is argued that international legitimacy and increasing domestic constraints have limited a leadership role. Indeed, it is argued that it is the domestic political situation that explains why ordo-liberalism has trumped pro-Europeanism. Ordo-liberal emphasis on stability culture has provided a valuable strategic resource for securing German objectives within the eurozone while satisfying the requirements of domestic politics.     

How Europe’s Political Leaders Made Sense of the Euro Crisis: The Influence of Pressure and Personality

The Greek announcement of its excessive debts led to one of the most severe crises the EU has faced since its inception. The crisis soon evolved into a full leadership crisis as European political leaders struggled to come up with a common solution to the challenges they faced. Theories of leadership and crisis management identify several factors that may contribute to these differences. This article examines to what extent leaders’ personal traits and external pressure influenced how six political leaders made sense of the situation. The study finds that a leader’s belief that they can control events, their self-confidence, as well as economic pressure provide a partial explanation of how European leaders make sense of the crisis. The traits of cognitive complexity and openness to information do not exert an influence in the cases discussed here. These findings indicate that any comprehensive understanding of how leaders make sense of crises should take note of specific individual as well as contextual factors.     

Of ‘Strong’ Leadership,Crisis Communication,and Pooper Scoopers: Change in the Queensland Public Service Under Newman

Governments have historically offered their workforce a public service bargain founded on stable pay and conditions and job security. However, while the Westminster system aims for public service employment to be protected from the whims of government, public servants are nonetheless affected by the political environment in which they operate and changes to this bargain can occur with a new government. This paper focuses on a Queensland public service change process that resulted in large‐scale forced redundancies, non‐renewal of temporary contracts, and legislative changes that nullified the provisions in job security, organisational change, and redundancy policies. Using communication as a lens through which to understand leadership, it examines how the government communicated with the public service about this organisational change, immediately before and after the 2012 election. In particular, through analysis of public and media commentary, speeches and Hansard records, it examines Premier Newman's change leadership and communication by contrasting pre‐election messages to the public service with post‐election messages about the public service and the justifications for change during this period of downsizing. This analysis is used to reflect on political leadership, communication, fair treatment, and trust in public service change.     

Authoritarian populism and response to COVID-19: A comparative study of the United States,India, and Brazil

As the phenomenon of populism is in the preliminary stages of exploratory research, the present study involves an empirical investigation involving a case study of the United States, India, and Brazil to examine whether a correlation exists between populism and management of COVID-19. The study adopts the ideational approach of populism as a set of ideas or discourse to review how core conceptual features of populism have impacted on management of COVID-19. The study has two main objectives: (1) to examine whether populism in the United States, India, and Brazil has determined “a populist response” to the pandemic in dealing with the health crises and (2) to explore the management of COVID-19 in the states led by right-wing populism and the commonality of populist approaches adopted in handling the health crisis. Comparing the three states' statistical data of management models, the study has argued that common populist mechanisms such as distrust for experts, contempt for institutions, and suspicion of “others” have guided the US, India, and Brazilian leadership response to COVID-19. It further argues that leadership in the United States, India, and Brazil has prevented effective management by politicizing the crisis, aggravating social polarization, and contradicting expert advice. Moreover, populist and nationalist orientation of the leadership has evaded responsibility in these states with the leadership blaming ethnicities for spreading the virus and by weakening societal solidarity.     

The Erosion of Party Politics in Britain

This article looks at the erosion of democratic practice enacted by "New" Labour in Britain under the leadership of Tony Blair. Building on the internal reforms of the 1980s, the process of Labour Party "modernization" has created an exclusive, top-down managerial style of leadership. This type of party leadership and management has far-reaching implications for British politics more generally, not least the role of political parties. The current crisis of the Conservatives and the destruction of representative democracy within the Labour Party pose serious questions regarding the medium-term future of parties as voluntary membership organizations. These changes are placed in the context of a possible longer-term transformation of British political structures in order to exchange the long-established administration of the Conservative Party for a new type of governmental machinery. The aim is not a new "traditional" party of government, but a partyless formation built around a dominant central presidential figure and his office—a change which necessitates abolishing the Labour Party and social democracy as they currently exist. It is argued that this anticipated remedy to a protracted crisis of the British state accords closely to the requirements of neoliberal economic management, while drawing upon developments in the wider global environment. However, if this is to succeed, Blair's "modernizing" tendency needs to be able to articulate a coherent ideology that strikes a popular chord. Thus far, Blair's managerial approach to politics may have scored a few points against the old party ideologies, but it has also undermined attempts to promote an alternative ideology—even one of a "partyless" nature.     

Information Dilemmas and Blame‐Avoidance Strategies: From Secrecy to Lightning Rods in Chinese Health Crises

China and other authoritarian states notoriously keep mum about disasters. Yet two recent but dissimilar Chinese responses to infectious disease epidemics show that authoritarian crisis management can shift from secrecy to openness. China maintained prolonged secrecy during 2003 SARS, yet was open from day one about 2009 H1N1 flu. To explore why, this article links crisis information dilemmas to blame avoidance concepts from democratic political theories. We argue that greater Chinese transparency about infectious disease response reflects evolution in blame avoidance, from heavy reliance on information control to insulating leaders by using technical experts and agencies as “lightning rods.” In 2003, the Chinese strategy of information containment and secrecy backfired, and the Chinese leadership eventually received blame at home and internationally for crisis mismanagement. In 2009, China put in place public health specialists and institutions as responsible for H1N1 information and responses, thereby insulating the top‐tier leadership.     

The unseen hands: Collaborative instrumental leadership in the British renegotiation case

The article contends that an important but overlooked explanation for the European Union's resilience in the past decade in the face of several existential crises has been the informal instrumental leadership roles played by EU institutional actors collaborating with each other. In this article, a theoretical framework is developed that can explain why EU governments, facing a crisis, would choose to informally delegate leadership tasks to a set of EU institutional actors. A three-part mechanism of collaborative instrumental leadership provided by institutions is devised that explains why governments informally delegate leadership tasks to EU institutions, and the effects of this informal delegation. The core of the article is a process-tracing case study that explores how collaborative instrumental leadership actually works. The case selected is the British renegotiation of their terms of membership in 2015–2016. While the case has become more-or-less forgotten because the shock ‘no’ vote in the June 2016 Brexit referendum made its terms moot, the deal included quite exceptional reform proposals in which the EU bent over backwards to accommodate the United Kingdom, perhaps even going beyond the bounds of the EU Treaties themselves in the issue of immigration. Given this, analysing how collaborative instrumental leadership supplied by institutions contributed to producing the ambitious deal can shed light on the processes whereby intractable problems in the EU have been solved in the past decade.     

How did the euro area survive the crisis?

Six recent books differ in their explanations as to how the euro area survived the crisis. In this review it is concluded that strong supranational institutions rather than German or Franco-German leadership, shared identity or the popular legitimacy of central institutions have been the crucial condition. Popular support for the euro has remained relatively high in many member states. While the crisis led to some expansion of the intergovernmental method, survival of the euro area required a great expansion in the powers of supranational institutions.     

HAVA and the States

Two major events—the 2000 vote counting crisis in Floridaand passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in October 2002—spawneda wave of federal, state, and local policy innovation and policyimplementation. The major effect of the Florida crisis was anationwide effort to analyze information on elections and todebate policy solutions. Subsequently, HAVA, the first majorelection law in U.S. history that includes federal funds forelection equipment and operations, had a more substantial effecton policy innovation and implementation. Both before and afterHAVA, election law changes have been affected by partisan considerations,policy analyses, and entrepreneurial leadership. Thus far, HAVAhas positively affected election administration, though administrativepractices and their effectiveness vary across and within thestates.     

A comparative study of Twitter utilization in disaster management between public and private organizations

Twitter has become a commonly used platform by both public and private organizations to assist with the dissemination of information related to disaster management. This research makes use of a mixed‐method approach in determining the extent and manner in which Twitter is used to disseminate disaster management information by both public and private organizations. This research found that public organizations are bound by strict regulations resulting in a lower volume and smaller variety of disaster‐related information being disseminated. The nature of an organization and the processes of decision making therein are suggested to influence the ability of an organization to successfully use Twitter as an effective tool for disaster management. Organizations in Thailand currently underutilize Twitter for disaster management, as neither public nor private organizations use Twitter as a multidirectional communication disaster management tool.     

Pakistan on the brink

The massive suicide bomb that destroyed the Marriott hotel in Islamabad on 20 September drew international attention to three crises – security, political and economic – that are challenging Pakistan and its leadership. The rise of a local Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan is a major concern. So are ongoing political uncertainty and an economic crisis that saw Pakistan ask the International Monetary Fund for a $7.6 billion loan in November.