Comparing Greek and German Interest Groups in the Eurozone Crisis Through Discursive Actor Attribution Analysis

Which interest groups blame whom for the Eurozone crisis? Which are the events within which these blames are made? What issues are involved? This paper offers fresh, binational data produced with a new methodological tool aiming to contribute to the related discussions conceptually and theoretically. Following Hojnacki et al’s (2012) suggestions on future research for interest group researchers, the paper aims to improve our understanding of how context affects the political behavior and influence of organized interests, and to link the study of groups to the study of policy making and politics in general. The paper provides a systematic and comparative account of Greek and German interest groups (governments, firms, movements, and clubs*) focusing on their Eurozone-crisis related discursive attributions, from September 2009 to September 2013. The analysis will describe and discuss attributions of responsibility by interest group type, event type and issue type; it will also explore the level of ideological polarization within each national data set, vis-a-vis the related political opportunities and threats. The discursive actor attribution analysis is based on content analysis tools from social movement studies, i.e. protest event analysis, frame analysis and political claim analysis, and analysis of responsibility attribution. It forms a new approach with the advantage of including many of the merits of the aforementioned perspectives but does not rely on predefined argumentative structures. Based on the first sample of 424 articles yielding 1,211 attributions (as well as a preliminary analysis of the running systematic sample of several thousand attributions) this paper stems from the research project “The Greeks, the Germans and the Crisis (GGCRISI*)”, a Greek-German project, funded by the General Secretariat for Research and Technology of the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs, Culture and Sports of Greece and the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research. *Following Schmitter and Streeck, 1999 **http://www.ggcrisi.info/