Right-wing populist parties (RWPPs) view immigration as a threat to national identity and cultural and political cohesion. This paper explores the discourse on immigration of two such parties during a systemic crisis (the COVID-19 pandemic) in a borderland area that entails a specific "symbolization" of the border as a result of geographic proximity. What kind of bordering narratives occur in this context, and how do they evolve? To answer these questions, the major RWPPs operating in the Geneva region were studied: the Genevan Swiss People's Party and the Geneva Citizens' Movement. Through a critical discourse analysis, a total of 181 documents published between 1 January and 31 August 2020 were analyzed, including the parties' official Facebook posts, press releases, and newspaper articles. Results show that the context of the pandemic favored the emergence of a strong re-bordering narrative.

How did the legal and political-administrative relationship between central and local governments of two decentralised states shape their response to COVID-19? Literature and theories on decentralisation argue that federal and decentralised states are less able to respond to crises in a coordinated manner due to their perceived greater susceptibility to political conflict. Situated within this theoretical debate and based on the analysis of legal acts, political decisions, and relevant national news media articles between March and August 2020 in Germany and Italy, this research note shows that, counterintuitively, more decentralisation does not necessarily translate into more legal and political stress during pandemic management. In responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, Germany, a highly decentralised state, experienced less legal and political tensions than the less decentralised Italy. The key to understanding this variation lies in different institutional arrangements, complemented by the specific political cultures of both states.

One major problem of compliance with anti-coronavirus measures originates from the so-called exponential growth bias, i.e. the cognitive distortion of systematically underestimating exponential growth and its consequences. We replicate an Amazon MTurk experiment regarding the spread of SARS-CoV-2 that was conducted in the general US population during the first wave of the pandemic in March 2020 dealing with this bias. Using a least-likely-design-approach, we find a similarly strong bias in our sample of German students in November 2020. Nevertheless, this bias can be reduced by one simple educational intervention. Furthermore, participants who received these educational nudges showed a considerably higher approval rating for contact restrictions. This effect is robust to different analytical techniques and the inclusion of controls. Complementing political statements about the exponential spread of the virus - which often only mention the name of the phenomenon - with simple educational nudges could help the public better understand the need for encroachments on personal liberties.

The Swiss Municipal Data Merger Tool (Swiss MDMT) offers a solution to a frequent data management problem encountered when compiling longitudinal datasets involving Swiss municipalities as the observational units. Due to municipal mergers, the number of municipalities in Switzerland declined from 3,095 in 1960 to 2,202 in 2020. As a consequence, manually securing the correct spatial reference when merging historical cross-sectional data is tedious and time-consuming. To facilitate this operation, the Swiss MDMT considers mutations at the municipal level and maps municipalities of a first point in time to municipalities in a second point in time based on information provided by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office's municipality inventory. The tool is distributed as an open-source R package and is freely available on CRAN.

Crises like the current coronavirus pandemic evoke negative emotions in the general public. To date, however, little research has been conducted on the influence of these mental states on trust in the government - the uncontested key player in times of crises. Drawing on the appraisal and affective intelligence theories of emotions, we argue that fear and anger as the two crucial negative emotions in times of crises have divergent effects on trust in the government: Whereas fear leads to a rally-'round-the-flag effect increasing trust in the government, anger attributes blame for the adverse circumstances to the government. We present empirical evidence for our arguments with an original three-wave online panel survey of 1'600 Swiss residents during the unprecedented times of the coronavirus pandemic. Our analysis provides empirical support for our arguments and further shows that the relationship is strongest for right-wing respondents.

Public opinion on COVID-19 provides new empirical evidence for the debate on the ideological contours of conspiracy theories. I report findings from a web survey in Greece where participants were recruited via paid advertising on Facebook and the study sample was adjusted for age, gender, education, domicile, and region of residence using a nationally representative reference sample. I find that beliefs about conspiracy theories are more correlated than the values associated with established political ideologies, and that conspiracy beliefs and scepticism about the pandemic are best explained by belief in unrelated political and medical conspiracy theories. No other demographic or attitudinal variable has such a strong influence, and the results are robust to different statistical specifications. In comparison, the effect of ideology measured by left-right self-placement is rather negligible and further moderated by trust in government. The results have implications for the strategies aimed at fighting disinformation during public health emergencies.

What is the effect of pandemics on partisan perceptions of government competence? Taking the case of Covid-19 in the UK, we explore how voters' assessments of the government's handling of the economy and health were affected by four events: the first UK Covid-19 death; the national lockdown; Boris Johnson's hospitalisation; and Cummings' scandal. Using a large representative weekly survey in the last year totalling over around 30'000 respondents, our results show that Labour voters had the worst assessments of government handling. The first death deteriorated perceptions of government handling of health among both Labour and Conservative voters, while Boris Johnson's hospitalisation improved perceptions among most voters. Lockdown improved the perception of health handling but at the cost of more negative perceptions of its handling of the economy. The Cummings scandal had a negative effect on perceptions of government handling of economy but surprisingly improved perceptions of its handling of health.

The Covid-19 pandemic severely threatens refugees: Most refugees live in developing countries with poor health care systems, the lockdowns left many refugees without income, border closures prevented forced migrants from their right to seek asylum and anti-refugee sentiment as well as insecurity in refugee settlements increased. Building on past refugee research and reports on refugee-related challenges during the Covid-19 crisis, we explain how bad sanitation, inadequate accommodation, additional restrictions of movement and employment and language barriers increase grievances among refugees and tensions between refugees and host populations. Particularly in large and overcrowded settlements these issues can lead to violent conflict, as we demonstrate with a case study of the Moria refugee camp in Greece. Yet, the impact of Covid-19 on refugees generally lacks politicization, and many governments are reluctant or unable to provide adequate housing and sanitation to refugees. We present policy recommendations for improving refugee protection amidst Covid-19, including not only the prevention of further spread of the virus but also that of insecurity.

Measures to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic have put a sudden halt to street protests and other forms of citizen involvement in Europe. At the same time, the pandemic has increased the need for solidarity, motivating citizens to become involved on behalf of people at risk and the vulnerable more generally. This research note empirically examines the tension between the demobilisation and activation potential of the COVID-19 crisis. Drawing on original survey data from seven Western European countries, we examine the extent, forms, and drivers of citizens' engagement. Our findings show the remarkable persistence of pre-existing political and civic engagement patterns. Concurrently, we show that threat perceptions triggered by the multifaceted COVID-19 crisis have mobilized Europeans in the early phase of the pandemic. Similarly, the role of extreme ideological orientations in explaining (regular) political engagement indicates that the current situation may create its specific mobilisation potentials.

International organizations such as the WHO have worked to raise awareness of the massive infodemic that accompanied the COVID-19 outbreak and made it hard for people to find trustworthy sources of information and reliable guidance for their decisions. Our contribution focuses on the Italian case, where the Communications Regulatory Authority (AGCOM) was able to act as first mover in its field so as to strategically frame the problem of disinformation in the absence of a pre-existing policy intervention. An emerging body of research shows that the activity of formally independent regulators is not necessarily limited to the implementation of delegated regulatory competencies. We discuss the implications of the activity of independent regulators for the fight against disinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that as a political actor in its own right, the Italian media regulator claimed control over sectoral expertise in order to shape the crucial first steps of the response to the infodemic.

We study the role of social media in debates regarding two policy responses to COVID-19 in Switzerland: face-mask rules and contact-tracing apps. We use a dictionary classifier to categorize 612'177 tweets by parties, politicians, and the public as well as 441'458 articles published in 76 newspapers between February and August 2020. We distinguish between "problem" (COVID-19) and "solutions" (face masks and contact-tracing apps) and, using a vector autoregression approach, we analyze the relationship between their salience on social and traditional media, as well as among different groups on social media. We find that overall attention to COVID-19 was not driven by endogenous dynamics between the different actors. By contrast, the debate on face masks was led by the attentive public and by politicians, whereas parties and newspapers followed. The results illustrate how social media challenge the capacity of party and media elites to craft a consensus regarding the appropriateness of different measures as responses to a major crisis.

With the arrival of vaccines against the novel coronavirus in late 2020, the issue of how vaccines should be distributed and which groups should be prioritized has become salient. We study popular attitudes toward the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines and how these have changed over the course of the pandemic in Switzerland, drawing on data from two rounds of an original public opinion survey conducted in the spring and winter of 2020. We find that the public supports prioritizing vulnerable groups such as health care workers or the elderly. We also find a notable degree of cross-generational solidarity: younger age cohorts prioritize the elderly, while older groups prioritize (typically younger) health care workers. We then examine whether this finding is not in fact driven by vaccine hesitancy. This is not the case for older age groups, whose solidarity thus seems to be genuine. Vaccine hesitancy is an issue among younger groups, however.

Not only Covid-19 has spread all over the world-the policies responding to this pandemic have also diffused rapidly across countries. In this research note, we present findings from an original dataset that features mobility restrictions in all EU/EFTA states as well as the United Kingdom during the first wave of the pandemic. We find that most countries adopted restrictions within a few days only and that restrictions on internal mobility had been introduced prior to restrictions on cross-border mobility, but that the latter have been more persistent. Furthermore, we observe an evolution from great variation of policy choices at the outset of the pandemic towards convergence. Analyzing the mobility restrictions through a policy diffusion lens, we find tentative evidence for interdependent policy-making especially in the temporal patterns of adoption. Our research note can serve a basis for future research on policy-making and policy diffusion in times of crisis.