Counter/Mobilizing on the Migration Crisis in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

The European refugee crisis has dramatically entered political and public agenda in Central and Eastern Europe. Even if there has been only a small number of refugees coming to stay in Central and Eastern European countries, the issue of migration has led to political polarisation and produced a new cycle of mobilizations and protest organized by both pro-refugee and anti-refugee movements and initiatives. The scholarly literature has widely recognized that political mobilizations depend largely on the political environment that may either stimulate or supress collective action. In our paper we aim to apply a comparative framework in order to assess the role of political institutions, political culture and political elites in the collective action related to refugee crisis. More specifically, we aim to utilize the similarity of institutional settings (or, political opportunities) and the attitudes of political elites (or, political space and discursive opportunities) towards the issue and elaborate on the differences in the political culture (or, cleavages) and their effect on the different patterns of mobilization on the migration. Using a digital news database and covering two most important countrywide newspapers in each country, we follow a protest event analysis approach and aim at collection, selection and coding of public protest events related to refugee crisis in the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 2015 and their analysis.