Communicating uncertainty in times of crisis. The legitimization of EU's response to COVID-19 pandemic through the discourse used by the President of the European Commission

Abstract

The aim of this article is to investigate the crisis communication narratives and how the European authorities approached the task of communicating uncertainty during the Covid-19 pandemic. Using the critical discourse analysis approach, the study explores how the legitimization of the EU's response was discursively built and if there was a distinction between uncertainty information and uncertainty experience in terms of crisis communication. To answer the question: what are the best ways for institutions to communicate uncertainties to public audiences in order to benefit from legitimization and trust for their actions? We analysed the official communication of the EU, namely the discourses and press statements by the President of the European Commission. The data were processed with Atlas.ti 8 and generated the points under discussion - correlations, narratives, linguistic recurrences, dynamics of main themes, and deconstruction of uncertainty. The study's findings support the importance of separating between uncertainty information and uncertainty experience and the continuity of message lines.