Four Cases, the Same Story? The Roles of the Prime Ministers in the V4 Countries During the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to deliver a comparative analysis of the behaviors and statements of the PMs in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Repub­lic, using the concept of adaptive leaderships as a base for analysis. We employed the usage of four fundamental skills proposed by Glover, Friedman and Jones (2002) and of five fundamental recom­mendations proposed by Macpherson and ‘t Hart (2020) to assess the behaviors and relevant state­ments of the PMs of the four analyzed countries during the time of the pandemic.The fact that all four analyzed PMs did not employ many adaptive leadership skills and recommenda­tions may serve as one of the possible explanations for the very problematic results in fighting COVID-19 during the second phase of the pandemic, when es­pecially the Czech Republic and Slovakia belonged to the most affected countries. The costs of such limited competence are borne by citizens and busi­nesses.

Keywords

• adaptive leadership
• covid-19 pandemic
• prime minister
• central and eastern europe.