In her article, Wagner-Olfermann first classifies the pandemic as a culmination of a series of transboundary crises since the beginning of the new millennium. It is therefore not only the coronavirus pandemic that forces us to rethink our concepts, but a completely new, recurring type of crisis. This new type exceeds national coping strategies and calls for coordinated, international solutions and thus also political leadership beyond national borders. Public visibility is an essential leadership resource on an otherwise poorly institutionalized level. This article therefore explores the question of how media construct and thus legitimize political leadership in transboundary crises. Previous work on the representation of political actors in media coverage does only limited justice to the complexity of political leadership at the transboundary level. In her contribution, Wagner-Olfermann therefore posits that perceptible political leadership in a transboundary crisis results from publicly observable processes of attributing responsibility across geographical and hierarchical boundaries. Consequently, an instrument to capture this discourse of responsibility is presented as an extension of previous approaches.
Interested parties can read the paper at the following link:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/TIPCSVDRTNP6BMJNCRNJ/full?target=10.1080/23808985.2022.2120520