Errors have been made, others will be blamed: issue engagement and blame shifting in Prime Minister speeches during the economic crisis in Europe

Abstract

In this paper we investigate prime ministers' communication strategies during the most recent economic crisis in Europe. We argue that when electoral risk is high but governments' policy options are severely limited, prime ministers will use specific communication strategies to mitigate electoral risks. We analyze two such communication strategies -issue engagement and blame shifting -by applying state-of-the-art quantitative text analysis methods on 5553 speeches of prime ministers in 9 EU member states. We find evidence for both strategies.Prime ministers talk about the economy more in response to both high (domestic) unemployment and low (domestic) GDP growth. Furthermore, we find the (domestic) unemployment rate to be the most consistent predictor of blame shifting: as the domestic unemployment rate goes up, this is followed by an increase in blame shifting towards banks, Greece and the Troika.

Issue Engagement Across Members of Parliament: The Role of Issue Specialization and Party Leadership

“…There is considerable evidence that political actors do indeed pursue issue engagement. This is true for individual political candidates (Damore 2005; Kaplan, Park, and Ridout 2006; Sigelman and Buell 2004), prime ministers (Traber, Schoonvelde, and Schumacher 2020), and for political parties (Dolezal et al 2014; Green‐Pedersen and Mortensen 2015; Klüver and Sagarzazu 2016; Meyer and Wagner 2016). While in the United States the focus has naturally been on issue engagement between political candidates , European research has examined how parties engage each other on issues.…”

“…First, much of the research focuses on the US two‐party system (e.g., Damore 2005; Hayes 2010; Kaplan, Park, and Ridout 2006; Sigelman and Buell 2004) and cannot easily be transferred to the different context of parliamentary multiparty systems in Europe (and elsewhere). Second, especially in multiparty systems, the empirical focus lies on the issue engagement between political parties (Green‐Pedersen and Mortensen 2015; Klüver and Sagarzazu 2016; Meyer and Wagner 2016; but see Traber, Schoonvelde, and Schumacher 2020). The assumption that parties engage with other parties as “unitary actors” deviates from the methodological individualism in the studies in the US context and limits our understanding of intraparty differences in how partisans engage with their competitors.…”

Candidates rather than context shape campaign sentiment in French Presidential Elections (1965–2017)

“…Even for short texts and across 50 years of elections, the sentiment dictionary provides good results. This should encourage future research into the sentiment of political communication in election campaigns, parliamentary debates or media reports and thereby add to an emerging literature on the relevance and role of sentiment in contemporary politics (e.g., Haselmayer and Jenny 2017;Rudkowsky et al 2018;Kosmidis et al 2019;Crabtree et al 2020;Traber et al 2020).…”

Shaping Public Opinion about Regional Integration: The Rhetoric of Justification and Party Cues

“…Existing studies of explanations in social relations (Benoit, 1995; Gonzales et al, 1995; Hareli, 2005; Schönbach, 1990) and politics (Bennett, 1980; Grose et al, 2015; Fenno, 1978; Hinterleitner and Sager, 2017; McGraw, 2002; Smith et al, 2005; Traber et al, 2020) conceive of the explanation primarily as an act of defense against reproaches and mounting outside pressure. By contrast, I propose that explanations can be used to play both defense and offense .…”

“…My model of the rhetoric of justification thus delineates how variation in the content of justifications affects public opinion. It builds on existing research, which investigates attitudinal consequences of the act of explaining (Esaiasson et al, 2017; Fenno, 1978; Jacobs and Shapiro, 2000) and of variation between functional categories of explanations (McGraw, 1991; McGraw et al, 1995; Smith et al, 2005; Traber et al, 2020).…”