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The Evolution of Crisis Frames in the European Commission's Institutional Communication (2003-2022)
[journal article]
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 str... view more
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 (N = 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.... view less
Keywords
EU; crisis communication; policy area; public communications; political communication; European Commission; crisis; political crisis
Classification
Media Contents, Content Analysis
European Politics
Free Keywords
European Union; crisis framing; crisis policy framing; policy framing; public diplomacy
Document language
English
Publication Year
2024
Journal
Media and Communication, 12 (2024)
Issue topic
Policy Framing and Branding in Times of Constant Crisis
ISSN
2183-2439
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed