The paper analyzes changes in the public discourse about the legitimacy of economic orders before and after the financial crisis. It is based on the coding of evaluative statements about economic regimes in quality newspapers in four countries (US, GB, Germany, Switzerland) between 1998 and 2011. The aim is, to analyze how the financial crisis has affected public discourse about economic regimes in terms of overall evaluation of economic regimes, changing structure of legitimating and de-legitimating argumentations. Can we observe the emergence of influential legitimizing and delegitimizing discourse coalitions?
To answer these questions the four national media discourses are conceptualized as (dynamic) discourse networks. The paper shows that the financial crisis only had an impact on the intensity of the debate, but did not produce powerful challenging discourse networks and thus did not lead to a crisis of legitimacy of the economic order.
