How did European Citizens Respond to the Great Recession? A Comparison of Claims Making in Nine European Countries, 2008–2014

Abstract

This paper examines the political responses of European citizens in the public domain, which is ‘claims making’, in the context of the economic crisis that started in 2008. The goal is to show how citizens in nine European countries have responded to the economic crisis—or at least how they have dealt with issues pertaining to it. We adopt a broad definition of claims making, including both a discursive (speech acts) and a behavioral (collective mobilizations) dimension. We do so using a broad focus that includes not only countries that have suffered greatly during the crisis, but also others that have, in part, been spared from it. Our aim is twofold: first, we want to provide a descriptive analysis of actors, issues, frames and other main characteristics of claims making, so as to consider potential (mis)matching with established scholarly knowledge of European models and institutional approaches. Second, we explain variations in claims making, in terms of both form and content, by means of comparing different political opportunities at work in the nine countries.

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 was funded by the European Commission under the 7^th Framework Programme (grant agreement no. 613237). A previous version of these results was produced in occasion of a collective publication produced as one of project deliverables (Cinalli and Giugni 2016). Any inconsistency among figures between the two publications bear to the fact that results presented in this article could benefit of a second thorough round of data cleaning.