Strategic Communication and Political Ideologies in South America. COVID-19 Crisis Management in the Cases of the Populist Governments of Argentina and Brazil

ABSTRACT

With regard to strategic communication, there is a set of additive factors driving the strategic complexity that determines the magnitude of an issue and the path to follow. During the COVID-19 pandemic, different governments worldwide have played a variety of roles and their impact has been conclusive. In Latin America, current political and ideological antagonism has configured a diversity of contexts and scenarios that have conditioned public communication management, setting out from the assumption that they have variously weighted the different driving factors of the strategic complexity. Within the framework of the EUPRERA COM-COVID network, we present the cases of strategic communication management of the national governments of Brazil and Argentina during the second half of 2020 and their impact on the population from the sanitary, social and economic levels. Of 1,332 demographically weighted cases, we analyze the information channels, credible sources, types of messages and their effectiveness comparatively. The most relevant conclusion lies in confirming that the strategic factor model in the public sector is conditioned by the ideological profile of who governs and this determines the decisions and effectiveness of the management.

Keywords:

• Strategic communication
• Covid-19
• populist governments
• Brazil
• Argentina
• Crisis communication

Acknowledgement

Andrea Oliveira is a Serra Hunter Fellow at Girona University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).