Government crisis communications during the COVID-19 pandemic: the case of Kazakhstan and Russia

Abstract

Public awareness and communication with civil society in times of crisis, especially during the currently ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, has become of great importance to many governments, the media, the public and other crucial government stakeholders. Problems of disinformation along with the low levels of social trust towards state institutions have challenged many nation-state governments and brought them also at the same new opportunities and ways to solve their domestic problems. In this article, these particularly two issues are addressed by analyzing the decision-making process of states and in the context of top-down and bottom-up approaches. As a case study, official COVID-19 statistics and official factchecking web portals of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Republic of Russia were evaluated and considered. Social projects such as those of BizBirgemiz and MyVmeste were also taken analyzed and included in our comparative analysis in this paper. This article is divided into four parts. The first part concerns the introduction section. The second section introduces, describes and studies the case studies this paper will look at. In the third section, the discussion and analysis of the case studies follow. Last but not the least, the fourth section concludes our analysis with additional policy recommendations provided. Our analysis has shown that in almost all cases the topdown approach dominates for both countries of Russia and Kazakhstan, except for the so-called initiated social project MyVmeste, which followed rather a bottom-up-led path. Despite that, the paper shows us how crisis situations with the COVID-19 pandemic have become both catalysts for solving specific societal problems, such as disinformation issue and a source for detecting insufficient policy interventions, particularly in the cyber realm.