In times of crisis people tend to gather around a leader – the so called “rally’round the flag effect”. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic seems to be no exception. Studies of Denmark and Sweden show that a “rally’round the flag”-effect occurred in both countries during the spring of 2020. Because the two countries used different strategies to combat the virus at the time, the cause of the quickly increased support for the national leaders is unclear. This essay examines one possible contributory reason: nationalist rhetoric. By analyzing Danish and Swedish national leaders’ framing of the pandemic, using banal nationalism to highlight the prosaic and implied aspects of nationalism, I show that nationalist rhetoric is present, both in the definition of the problem and as the proposed solutions. In both cases an emphasis on the typical national qualities is shown. In conclusion, the findings in this essay point to the fact that further studies in this yet to be fully explored field of studies are of interest, especially from a perspective of democracy.

Building on the logic of issue selling, my dissertation explores the micro-processes of shareholder social activism through which shareholders interact with targeted firms and also addresses which micro-processes could affect the effectiveness and the success of shareholder social activism. To do this, my dissertation develops a theory with respect to the approaches of linguistically framing the contents of and of presenting shareholder social activism. Based on a qualitative (descriptive) analysis on 1,612 shareholder social proposals, my dissertation identifies six packaging strategies that are used by the proponents to linguistically frame the contents of their proposals and two selling strategies used by the proponents to present their proposals. Subsequently, a quantitative analysis demonstrates that the effectiveness of shareholder social proposals would be largely determined by the joint effects of opportunity framing, threat framing, coalition building, and repeated submitting and that other packaging strategies would have little unique contribution to the effectiveness and the success of shareholder social activism. I argue that my dissertation would make contributions to the understanding of shareholder social activism and also offer some theoretical considerations for future studies on issue selling, although my dissertation might not directly contribute to the body of work of issue selling. / Ph. D.

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