Pandemic narratives and policy responses: west European governments and COVID-19

Governments across western Europe have adopted significantly different policy responses to the existential challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose that a key to understanding the differences in policy responses may lie in narratives. Focusing on fifteen countries in western Europe, as well as two contrasting case studies on Sweden and Greece, we investigate the relationship between the narratives that governments developed on the threats generated by COVID-19, and the (early) stringency of their respective policy responses that followed. Our analysis suggests that there is an inverse relationship between the emphasis on the economic cost of the pandemic and on framing the disease as affecting ‘only’ certain sub-groups severely in government narratives, and the tendency to introduce early and stringent restrictions.