Strategies for inducing people’s cooperation in leaders’ COVID-19 addresses

Affiliation, polarization, and exclusion

Abstract

This article explores the strategies by which three world leaders induce people’s cooperation in their COVID-19 addresses. The study examines how leaders exploit banal nationalism to evoke people’s solidarity and cooperation. The data comprised three addresses delivered upon the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic by Queen Elizabeth, President Trump, and King Salman bin Abdul Aziz. The critical analysis revealed that the two Western leaders, Queen Elizabeth and President Trump, exploited nationalism to generate solidarity and elicit cooperation from their people, using some strategies that align with Billig’s notion of banal nationalism and other strategies that go beyond banality. On the other hand, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, representing a non-Western approach in this study, avoided evoking nationalistic emotions and established a social, familial relationship with all groups of society. The study discusses how nationalistic strategies may have resulted in polarizing and excluding subgroups of society. The analysis also revealed that leaders may distance people instead of affiliating with them to construct a powerful image.