Which Crisis? European Crisis and National Contexts in Public Discourse

Is there such a thing as “the crisis” in the European public discourse? We investigate the Great Recession as it appears in the public discourse of seven European countries (Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland). We do so through a political claim analysis conducted on the most important newspapers of each country between 2005 and 2014. We show that the economic crisis, as a shared experience able to produce consequences on political processes, does matter, but not as one monolithic factor that generates homogeneous outcomes. Different countries are characterized by specific features, which need to be taken into account to understand the relationship between economic crisis and political change. We identify four different “crises” (the global financial crisis, the public debt and austerity crisis, the industrial productive crisis, and the political legitimacy crisis) and propose interpretations on the relationship between their relative visibility, structural factors, and political change.