Narrating COVID-19: how Europe as Union fares

The aim of this comparative study is to analyse how ‘Europe’ and the ‘EU’ featured in the extraordinary voluminous narrative about COVID-19 in a selected number of seven Member States and at the EU level, since COVID-19 became the dominant issue facing the EU and its member states in a very short time frame. The research question is threefold: How were Europe and the EU framed during the crisis in the national context? How did the EU collectively seek to frame its own role during the crisis? How did domestic actors seek to influence public opinion in other member states during the crisis?

The text analysis covers the acute phase of the pandemic (February-July 2020) using a mix of automated text analysis tools (Structural Topic Models) and manual coding to produce a report for each country case in addition to the comparative output.