Corona, the Lockdown, and the Media: A Quantitative Frame Analysis of Media Coverage and Restrictive Policy Responses

Corona, the Lockdown, and the Media investigates media influence on policies to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Bernhagen and Kybelka propose that news reporting on the pandemic pitches human impact against economic consequences of the virus and of restrictive policy measures designed to contain it. They argue that the use of these frames influences governments' decisions to enact or lift lockdown measures. Using time series data from England, France, and Germany, the authors show that news reporting on COVID-19 was indeed characterized by these media frames. However, there is no evidence of media influence on government policy. Instead, the authors find that anti-pandemic policy decisions were responsive to public opinion in these countries.

Patrick Bernhagen is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Previous appointments include a Chair in Political Science at Zeppelin University, Germany, and a Senior Lectureship in Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Current externally funded projects include "Lobbying Across Multiple Levels: German Federal Institutions, European Union, and the Länder". Combined peer-reviewed external research funding secured to date (post PhD) amounts to 2.2 m . He is the author of The Political Power of Business: Structure and Information in Public Policymaking (Routledge, 2007), co-author (with A. Dür and D. Marshall) of The Political Influence of Business in the European Union (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019) and co-editor (with C. Haerpfer, R. Inglehart and C. Welzel) of Democratization (Oxford University Press, 2^nd ed. 2019), as well as author or co-author of 27 research articles in international peer reviewed journals and 22 contributions to edited volumes.

David Kybelka is a student in the Franco-German Double Degree M.A. Programme Empirical Political and Social Research at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and Sciences Po Bordeaux, France. He holds B.A. Double Degrees in Social Sciences from the same institutions. David works part-time as a Research Assistant at the DIALOGIK research institute in Stuttgart. Prior to this he was a Teaching Assistant at the University of Stuttgart and a Research Assistant at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA, also in Stuttgart. His research interests focus on the application of computational modeling techniques to social science research questions.