Chapter 3. Communicating the Covid-19 pandemic : A comparison of government communication in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden

In this chapter, we utilise a framing analysis to compare Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish government communication during the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. The results show that the perceptions of the seriousness of the crisis and the expected challenges facing Scandinavian societies were shared by all three governments, but they framed their communications slightly differently. Though based on common perceptions of an extraordinary threat to society and efforts to demonstrate national solidarity, a key component of the differences between the three Scandinavian prime ministers’ framing of the crisis was related to the issue of political control: One prime minister had come to office with the intention of assuming full political control in crisis situations, another framed management of the crisis in accordance with the delegation of power, and the third sought balance between expert agencies and political control through transparency and openness