Political Leadership between Pandemic and Post-Pandemic Times

The session aims to host presentations, based on theoretical analysis or empirical research, that have analyzed the impact that the Coronavirus pandemic has had on political leadership, on its physiognomy, on its stylistic and communicative characteristics, on its image and its social representation, on its management of the decision-making process and, more generally, on its political agency.

The panel is therefore interested in welcoming analyses that:

• have reflected, also in a comparative perspective, on the challenges that the pandemic has posed to political leaders in different social contexts;
• have investigated specific issues related to the performance of individual leaders or selected “families” of leaders (such as their communication style or their political strategy);
• have identified and discussed specific variables in the reading and comparison between different leaders (such as gender, political culture, ideology, political role, party affiliation, etc.);
• have placed their studies on the interaction between leadership and pandemic in the frame of longer-term political trends and dynamics, such as the rise of populism, the re-emergence of authoritarianism and sovereignism, the crisis of democracy and intermediate bodies, the process of personalization / leaderization of the political scene, the intensification of the processes of political mediatization.

Political Leadership between Pandemic and Post-Pandemic Times is a regular papers presentation session. It will host maximum five 20-minute oral presentations.