Linking crises: connections between climate change and COVID-19 during American, Canadian, Dutch, and Lithuanian national elections (2020-2021)

Abstract

Crisis responses are created in reference to the meanings of other crises. We develop the notion of ‘linking crises’ to capture this phenomenon and apply it to two contemporary global crises: climate change and COVID-19. Concretely, we study four crisis linkage dimensions in American, Canadian, Dutch, and Lithuanian party manifestos for national elections from the pandemic heydays (2020–2021): (1) how often links were drawn; (2) the issues they were related to; (3) the argumentative strategies for making connections; and (4) and the political level on which this occurred. We find many cross-national similarities. For instance, in every country links with economic and environmental issues were very present, an argumentative trope of ‘building back better’ was employed by various political parties, and the majority of the connections were made at supra-national levels. These findings bring up the question of when cross-national parity in crisis responses does (not) occur. Keywords: crisis, climate change, Covid, meaning-making, discourse, comparative politics, national elections