Recent European migration or refugee crisis has in 2015 opened a lively and heated public debate in the Czech Republic. Although the real effects of this crisis (in terms of number of immigrants seeking asylum in the country) has been only marginal, it dramatically affected public discourse, influenced interaction among institutionalized political actors and even launched a cycle of contentious claim-making in the streets. Many actors got involved on different levels, with various motives and various claims and different framing. One of the most interesting features of this political situation was the mixture of economic and anti-Islamic claims from the part of political elites and newly established civic initiatives, their appeals to Christianity, but also reinforcement of existing anti-EU discourse, dramatic rise of xenophobia and the hate-speech activities. On the other hand, part of the political elites and civil society actors launched pro-immigration campaign and attempted to mobilize the public opinion in favour of the provision of asylum to refugees. This debate was widely mirrored also by the mainstream media which further contributed to the dramatic split of the public opinion between the two political camps.
Generally, it seems that – so far - the whole refugee crisis in the Czech Republic took place dominantly in the realm of public debate and language rather than in real policies and political decisions. Therefore, we aim at the capturing a coherent picture of the situation through the analysis of public claim making and its framing. More particularly we aim at answering following research questions: Who were the most prominent actor-types in the debate? What were their main claims? What kind of framing was used here? Furthermore, we aim at mapping the symbolic networks of actors in the debate. The aim of the network analysis it to analyse symbolic networks in the public discourse which interconnect participants who make either positive or negative reciprocal references, who formulate their claims together, or who use same types of frames in the debate on the current crisis to Europe and come up with a map of symbolic structure of Czech discourse on the migration. This map provides comprehensive overview of the actors who share similar or identical positions within the public discourse.
We rely on the data from Czech media database and we analyse the media coverage of the crisis in 2015, including most important papers and TV programmes. We apply standard political claim analysis – i.e. we sample the instances of claim-making related to the refugee crisis, and then analyse its aspects (author, form, target, object, and frames used).
