Political Claims and Discourse Formations: A Comparative Account on Germany and Greece in the Eurozone Crisis

Abstract

The economic crisis following the financial meltdown in 2007 had disparate impacts for citizens of the southern and northern Eurozone member states. In this study, we analyze public debates in Germany and Greece, two countries that have attracted global attention during the crisis, through a political claims analysis based on newspaper articles published between 2005 and 2014. The article makes use of multiple correspondence analysis to detect the patterns governing the discursive construction of the European financial and economic crisis. Our findings corroborate the expected differences between the Greek and German debates in regard to core issues and assessments. However, the de-alignment of political cleavages in both countries is notable and stresses seemingly an underlying mainstreaming process that limits the diversity of crisis-related claims.Keywords: Claims-Making Analysis, Europe, Economic Crisis, Great Recession, Discourse Communities, Discourse Analysis, Crisis Acknowledgements: Results presented in this article have been obtained within the project "Living with Hard Times: How Citizens React to Economic Crises and Their Social and Political Consequences" (LIVEWHAT). This project is/was funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (grant agreement no. 613237). We would like to thank Manlio Cinalli (Science Po, Paris) and Jordi Muñoz Mendoza (Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona) for their valuable comments and suggestions on a previous draft of this article. Moreover, we are grateful for the support of Perikles Drakos (University of Crete) in regard to MCA, and for a number of research assistants responsible for the coding of the claims-making data.

The Diverging Presence of Youth in Public Discourse: A Comparative Analysis of Youth-Related Debates Across Countries and Issue Fields

“…In many of these issue fields, we are speaking about specialized arenas of policy deliberation, with specialized actors or actor alliances having a specific mandate or interest in shaping and guiding public deliberations. Our findings corroborated this assumption and earlier findings on policy communities (Jordan & Richardson, 1983; Lahusen et al, 2016; Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993; Singer, 1990; Swales, 1990), because we were able to identify a specific set of specialized actors behind each issue: We could speak about educational actors guiding education-related debates, labor organization, and professional groups shaping labor-related debates, the judiciary, and the police imprinting on discussions about criminal behavior. Since public discourses shape society’s view of public issues (cf.…”

“…The relative absence is not necessarily a surprising finding, because youth actors belong mainly to the group of nonstate actors. And previous analyses have shown that mass-mediated debates greatly privilege state actors—in particular, the members of the executive—when comparing them with all other claims-making actors (e.g., Bennett & Manheim, 1993; Giugni, 2010; Lahusen et al, 2016). More telling are the differences between countries (assumed in Hypothesis 1) and the fact that France is among the countries with the highest share of claims made by youth actors, followed by Italy and Greece.…”

“…On the other hand, nation-states have established specialized policy domains devoted to specific issues and areas of public interventions. Within each of these policy domains, specialized policy communities, advocacy coalitions, or discourse communities have been established (Jordan & Richardson, 1983; Lahusen, Kousis, Kiess, & Paschou, 2016; Singer, 1990; Sabatier & Jenkins-Smith, 1993; Swales, 1990), which tend to shape, guide, and monopolize public deliberations about their issues. Public debates should thus be patterned along different policy domains, each of them tied back to a set of policy actors with a clear mandate and/or strong vested interests in the issues at stake.…”

The Political Attitudes of Divided European Citizens

“…However, mass media do not fulfil this function in the sense of a mirror image since the actors involved and the mass media that circulate these claims interpret, construe and translate these events. This applies in particular to the public debates on the economic and financial crisis, since the current situation had to be initially considered to be "crisis-like", and actors had to agree on such an assessment if crisis perception was to establish itself as "public opinion" (Bohmann and Vobruba 1992;Stråth and Wodak 2009;Coleman 2013;Lahusen Kousis, Kiess and Paschou 2016). The interpretation of a situation as a crisis is necessarily linked to public debate because such interpretations must be negotiated, recognised and shared.…”

“…There is no doubt that such interpretations respond to economic, political or social events and people's experiences with them. But a situation must first be defined as a crisis, which is why public discourses are an important arena for these -certainly contested -interpretations (Coleman 2013;Kiess 2019;Lahusen et al, 2016). It has also been confirmed at the level of individual crisis perception that external events and circumstances also need to be interpreted as "crises".…”