Abstract. The article sheds light on the political

Women’s underrepresentation in political leadership has been a constant global challenge during recent decades. Although women’s leadership and its impact on organizational and country performance have been systematically explored, new research avenues are opened through the emergence of various crises. Crises constitute instances in which the intersection of leadership and communication is shaped and enforced, and how female leaders tackled and managed crises has been found to be different from that of their male counterparts in various instances. This study aims to examine the crisis communication approach taken by Jacinda Ardern during the 2020 global public health crisis generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Female leaders were found to enforce a more effective and persuasive communication approach during the crisis, but Jacinda Ardern’s crisis management approach has been grounded in a feminist ethics of care since her response to the Christchurch mosque shootings in 2019. This article aims to emphasize the importance of communication in reframing leadership, by analyzing Jacinda Ardern’s Facebook communication from the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis. By examining how her messaging is embedded in values and attitudes specific to the ethics of care, we contribute to theorizing ways in which crisis communication is grounded in feminist ethics.

While innovation has evolved into a common concept for quite a few decades now, especially given the need for new forms of development that require technology transfer and creativity mechanisms, less so is the case of social innovation. The latter remains a rather controversial concept, caught between two extremes: some authors consider it to be useless for academic research given its vagueness, while others point to its sacrosanctity given the need for new ways of societal and political development. Knowledge-creation, idea generation and openness are mechanisms that any type of innovation relies upon. However, social innovation takes these concepts one step further and seeks to become a driving force for institutional change, therefore strongly linked with how liberal democracy works. The current paper aims to look at how social innovation is linked to the participative component of liberal democracy by looking at case studies from the European Union.

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Understanding populism as a communication strategy (Aalberg et al. 2017) that is based on both messages and styles (Engesser et. al., 2017), the present research investigates the populist elements of political discourses articulating the subject of “corruption” in the context of the attempts to change the anti-corruption legislation by the Romanian government in 2017–2018. Based on audience preferences and on the density of political communication conducted by both political and media actors, the study conducted content analysis articles from three major Romanian TV-related news portals during February 2017 and May 1 – June 5, 2018 (N=548). In addition, computer-assisted content analysis was performed on social media posts of political parties (N=875) and the posts of their leaders (N=540). The research not only identified elements of populist political communication both in the content and the style of corruption-discourses but also reflected the polarization of the Romanian media system.