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Next slide please: the politics of visualization during COVID-19 press briefings

Next slide please: the politics of visualization during COVID-19 press briefings
Next slide please: the politics of visualization during COVID-19 press briefings
How do governments visually communicate policies, and what does this reveal about actors’ political objectives? Governments strategically narrate their priorities, yet few studies examine this process through visual modes. We contribute to theoretical and empirical understanding in policy studies by focusing on the UK government’s COVID-19 response through its daily press briefings during the first wave of 2020. Combining quantitative changepoint and content analysis with qualitative discourse analysis, we examine all 79 sets of slides when briefings occurred. We identify a reactive phase focused on communicating knowledge about the pandemic in a boundedly rational manner, and a proactive phase that created new policy-based narratives of the pandemic. Besides contributing to emerging pandemic-related policy scholarship, we argue that conceiving these visualizations as visual narrative assemblages is relevant more broadly because it shifts attention to the interaction and interdependence of multiple visualizations as they enable policymakers to perform their authority to govern.
1350-1763
729-755
Allen, William L.
f0d4731a-81c1-4886-b11c-74dfa412bb97
Bandola-Gill, Justyna
ddff77ef-7b8e-4621-afa4-7dc5b232af19
Grek, Sotiria
60392773-1120-400a-b28a-2b9b819971e3
Allen, William L.
f0d4731a-81c1-4886-b11c-74dfa412bb97
Bandola-Gill, Justyna
ddff77ef-7b8e-4621-afa4-7dc5b232af19
Grek, Sotiria
60392773-1120-400a-b28a-2b9b819971e3

Allen, William L., Bandola-Gill, Justyna and Grek, Sotiria (2024) Next slide please: the politics of visualization during COVID-19 press briefings. Journal of European Public Policy, 31 (3), 729-755. (doi:10.1080/13501763.2022.2160784).

Record type: Article

Abstract

How do governments visually communicate policies, and what does this reveal about actors’ political objectives? Governments strategically narrate their priorities, yet few studies examine this process through visual modes. We contribute to theoretical and empirical understanding in policy studies by focusing on the UK government’s COVID-19 response through its daily press briefings during the first wave of 2020. Combining quantitative changepoint and content analysis with qualitative discourse analysis, we examine all 79 sets of slides when briefings occurred. We identify a reactive phase focused on communicating knowledge about the pandemic in a boundedly rational manner, and a proactive phase that created new policy-based narratives of the pandemic. Besides contributing to emerging pandemic-related policy scholarship, we argue that conceiving these visualizations as visual narrative assemblages is relevant more broadly because it shifts attention to the interaction and interdependence of multiple visualizations as they enable policymakers to perform their authority to govern.

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Accepted/In Press date: 5 December 2022
e-pub ahead of print date: 10 January 2023
Published date: 3 March 2024

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 500018
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/500018
ISSN: 1350-1763
PURE UUID: d14651eb-07f0-456e-a6ea-bcb6ea2ac41e
ORCID for William L. Allen: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-3185-1468

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Date deposited: 11 Apr 2025 16:41
Last modified: 22 Aug 2025 02:43

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Contributors

Author: William L. Allen ORCID iD
Author: Justyna Bandola-Gill
Author: Sotiria Grek

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