Framing the Eurozone Crisis in National Parliaments: Is the Economic Cleavage Really Declining?

Abstract

While it is undisputed that the Eurozone crisis has contributed to the politicization of European integration, existing research has not conclusively established which cleavages have structured the ensuing debates. To shed light on this question, we examine how the crisis was framed in parliamentary debates in four Eurozone states (Germany, Austria, Spain and Ireland) between 2009 and 2014. We engage with research findings that describe national parliaments’ response to the crisis as being structured primarily by a transnational cleavage, defined by attitudes towards European integration, rather than by the left-right divide. We use a combination of content and cluster analysis to identify the discursive frames that parliamentarians employed to make sense of the crisis, and then assess which factors affected how these frames were used. Our findings show that the left-right cleavage remained dominant in the four parliaments’ crisis discourse.

Framing the Eurozone Crisis in National Parliaments: Is the Economic Cleavage Really Declining?