Discursive Actor Attribution Analysis: A Tool to Analyse How People Make Sense of the Crisis

Making sense of the Eurozone Crisis is a process of assigning and rejecting responsibility: claiming success or blaming for failures, calling actors to do something, and demanding the right for actors to be in charge of acting. The paper will present an instrument to analyze these interpretations: the discursive actor attribution analysis. In a Greek-German project we analyze the interpretations actors put forward in public, relying on newspapers and Reuters. The discursive actor attribution analysis focuses on the attribution of responsibility in various forms. It measures the link from a sender to an addressee to whom responsibility is assigned/rejected including the form of appearing in the public, the type of attribution and the reasoning. The method is based on political claims analysis (Koopmans/Statham) and attribution analysis (Gerhards/Offerhaus/Roose). The paper will illustrate our approach, and show preliminary findings on differences of actor attribution in the two countries. Panel 1: Changing interactions...