How to Talk about Crises? Leaders’ Narrative Strategies During the COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign in Italy and France

During a crisis, narratives matter as they allows us to make sense of an unpredictable situation and navigate urgency. The COVID-19 pandemic showed that the type of narratives and communication strategies used fundamentally shaped public opinion toward governmental efforts aimed at mitigating the virus. This article examines the role of narrative strategies utilized by France and Italy during the pandemic; focusing on the vaccination campaigns in both countries, to see how political leaders processed and framed both pandemic-related issues and recommended solutions. Furthermore, to track how narrative strategies and patterns in both countries developed over time, the authors applied the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) and an analytical typology that examines evidence versus emotion, as well as gain versus loss framing.

Hypotheses

The authors established several theoretical expectations to study changes in narrative strategies during crisis.

Evidence-based strategies will only be preferred over emotion-based arguments when sound information is available; evidence-based strategies are less likely to appear in earlier stages of a crisis.
Evidence-based strategies are more likely to be implemented when leaders have a scientific or technical background.
Decision-makers will try to extensively utilize gain-framed messaging in their narrative strategies given the social acceptability of positive communication.
The propensity of loss-framed messaging may increase when gain-framed strategies are ineffective or the desired outcomes need to be accelerated.

Methodology

The authors examined a total of 22 documents (13 Italian and 9 French) that included speeches and press releases from government leaders and Health Ministers in both Italy, as well as France. These documents were selected from 2021, encompassing the first phases of vaccination campaigns pursued by the French and Italian governments. Moreover, the authors utilized Discourse Network Analyzer (DNA) software to code for narratives present in the collected documents.

Key Findings

Who are the Heroes and Villains of the Pandemic?

Figure 2 shows that in the majority of cases and in both countries, vaccines were narrated as the “heroes” of the story, alongside restrictive measures and health staff—with science also featuring as a “hero”, though only in the Italian case. The distribution of “heroes” is notably similar across the two countries. The more meaningful differences emerge on the “villains” side: while COVID-19 and its variants feature as the primary “villain” in both countries, no-vax people appear far more frequently as “villains” in the French case than in the Italian one. These patterns indicate that while France and Italy broadly share the same “heroic” narratives around vaccines, French leaders were considerably more inclined to cast unvaccinated individuals in an antagonistic role—a finding consistent with the greater use of loss-framed and scaring tactics observed in the French narrative strategies more broadly.

Figure 2. Heroes and Villains in the French and Italian Narratives.

France and Italy Used Different Narratives Strategies Over Time

As illustrated in Figure 6, during Phase 1 of the vaccination campaign, both France and Italy utilized encouraging narrative approaches to build trust; this was more pronounced in France whereas Italy employed a mixture of an encouraging approach and logical persuasion. However, across Phases 2-3, the narrative strategies began to diverge in both countries as France resorted toward admonition and scaring practices, whereas Italy balanced admonition with gain-framed types of narratives (i.e., logical persuasion and an encouraging approach). These findings indicate that France was more likely to depend on alarmist and emotional narrative tactics to increase vaccination rates, whereas Italy pursued a more technical, deliberative approach.

Figure 6. Narrative Strategies by Country and Phase.

Why It Matters

This article reveals that narratives are not simply “talk”, but represent strategic tools applied to shape public acceptance toward restrictive policies. By focusing on France and Italy as empirical cases of COVID-era narratives, the study illuminates how political leaders in different national settings communicated with the public during a time of crisis. The authors encourage future research to apply their typological framework to other crises, such as climate change mitigation, to determine whether evidence-based or emotion-based strategies are employed in different policy contexts. Understanding these narrative patterns can help future political leaders select communication strategies that mediate compliance and institutional trust.

Read the original article in Policy Studies Journal:

Mastroianni, Laura and Stefania Profeti. 2025. “How to Talk About Crises? Leaders’ Narrative Strategies During the COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign in Italy and France.” Policy Studies Journal 53(4): 994–1013. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12585.

About the Article’s Author(s)