Mapping European actors’ tweets about Covid-19
Follow this link to find a visual representation of the connections and interactions between 17 EU institutional actors* central in the decision-making process of policies addressing the Covid-19 pandemic. To build this map, all 7810 tweets about Covid-19 from these actors between March and May 2020, were identified and all user mentions were extracted from individual tweets. User mentions are indicative of relations between actors and high frequency of mentions shows greater centrality in the network, and thus, stronger influence. The goal of this exploration is thus to gather information about the position of actors in the network, as well as the occurrence and strength of relation between actors.
The map shows a number of interesting insight, here we select three:
First, the network is very dense, which shows high levels of cohesiveness and interconnection between European actors at all levels of government (executive and legislative/intergovernmental and supranational). Central actors are either the EU Commission/President itself, or specific DGs related to Covid-19 management (DG Health, DG Home Affairs). At this stage of the crisis, political parties are already active, but still only play a peripheral role. Moreover, the latter are often not directly connected, but rather interact through members of the commission and DGs. This is consistent with the shape of the initial response to the pandemic, where executive actors everywhere were given extraordinary powers to make immediate, large scale decisions related to the management of the crisis.
Second, the map provides an extremely interesting illustration of EU’s “echo chamber” on Twitter. One of the main actors in this network is the ECDC (European Centre for Disease Control). The ECDC was founded in 2004 and is a technical agency of the EU with a coordinative role on health security. In a March 28th tweet, it answered to a user, surprised to find a “European CDC” in the middle of a worldwide pandemic:
Rising up to the occasion of the pandemic, the ECDC enhanced its reach on twitter by tripling its number of tweets over the period from previous years (from 171 in 2018 to 622 in 2020). It also increased 30 folds its number of retweets on original tweets (from about 600 for the trimester in 2018 to almost 20 000 in March-May 2020). By connecting more and more over time to actors with much larger following such as the European Commission (1.4 million followers) and the European Council (550 000 followers), it became more visible and central in the European pandemic discourse network (the ECDC has around 70 000 followers). Knowing that health is only a supporting competence of the EU, the weight of the coordinative discourse led by the ECDC is large compared to its decisional power. This is in line with the strategical position of the EU to put forward its technical role in facilitating coordination between political actors rather than attempting to push against national stakeholders on more politicized issues such as health. This will certainly motivate other actors (among which political parties are deemed to play a major role) to jump on the wagon and demand more integrated health systems.
Finally, we observe that the size if the network is very large, especially taking into account that we only look at 17 actors. This indicates a wide reach and an enormous potential to influence discourses and decisions outside the somewhat closed community of European political actors. We already see international actors such as the WHO and the UN taking an important place in the discussion, and national political and administrative actors are also reached within only one or two steps, either because they share a certain number of characteristics (also referred to as “homophily”) such as: belonging to the same political family, sharing a nationality, etc, or through reciprocity, when both actors find an interest in a bidirectional relationship.
The next step is to include decision-makers from the international and national level to the network, and observe how existing relation change, and whether new ones are established. This will be the topic of a future post.
* the 17 actors are: The European Commission, President, DG Health, DG Home Affairs, DG External Affairs, European Council, President, ECDC, Europol, Frontex, and political groups in the European Parliament (Greens, GUE/NGL, Socialists, EPP, Renew Europe and ECR (I&D did not have a twitter account over the period).
