How to talk about crises? Leaders' narrative strategies during the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in Italy and France

Defined by threat, urgency, and uncertainty, crises produce opportunities for government leaders to exploit and create meaning around their policy decisions in such unstable circumstances. In narrating their preferred policy solutions, one of the tools governments can use is relying on evidence-based information. However, some studies have also stressed the importance of recovering emotional inputs when directing the public toward policy compliance. Based upon this premise, we first propose an original typology intersecting evidence/emotions with loss/gain-framed narrative dimensions, enriching the analytical tools available to the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), especially when it is applied to studying and interpreting the formulation of policy narratives in times of crisis. We then propose a set of expectations that are empirically tested against the narrative strategies concerning the vaccination campaign during the COVID-19 crisis in two European countries, Italy and France. By taking into account the official public statements of the executive leaders and health ministers, they have been analyzed through the Discourse Network Analyzer (DNA) software, incorporating our typology into the NPF coding scheme. The analysis shows that tracing leaders' policy narratives back to the evidence/emotion and gain/loss dimensions allows more nuanced differences to emerge that are not immediately observable by resorting to the NPF standard categories. Indeed, although the stories of vaccination against COVID-19 told in the two countries are broadly similar in terms of the characters and the moral of the story, and emotion-based narrative strategies prevail in both contexts, we observe a greater overall use of admonitions and scaring tactics in France than in Italy. Moreover, when looking at the evolution of strategies over time, the stability of gain-framed narratives in the Italian case seems less consistent with the progressively more intrusive nature of the policy solutions adopted by the government.