Abstract

Historical accounts of the EU recurrently turn to crisis as a periodizing or structuring concept, reflecting the observation made by scholars that crisis has become a permanent feature of the social construction of our social and political reality. The concept of crisis can also be exploited for strategic purposes by political actors pursuing various policy agendas. Our article analyzes the discursive uses of crises by one of the central institutions of the EU, the European Commission, based on a corpus of press releases that referred to crisis (<em>N = </em>4,414) going back two decades (2003–2022). Thus, our article examines crisis as a political language and its discursive uses. We ask: (a) how salient is the topic of “crisis” in the European Commission’s communication; (b) what are the main domains in which the crisis frame has been activated, from geographical scope to policy areas; (c) how did the deployment of crisis frames change in time along major policy areas like economy, migration, or climate change; and (d) in what terms has the crisis-frame been activated, and how does crisis word use vary by region and policy area. Methodologically, we pursue these research questions using text-as-data methods, combining natural language processing tools for identifying geographical scopes, actors, and policy areas with corpus methods for identifying keywords and collocates and manually coding the latter, relying on qualitative and quantitative reasoning. Our research contributes to understanding the dynamics of EU policy framing in times of crisis.

Full Text
Paper version not known

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.