Dividing United Europe by Aline Sierp Christian Karner

Author:Aline Sierp, Christian Karner [Aline Sierp, Christian Karner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780429682971
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

Emotions in the Greek financial crisis

In a study that sets the stage for the exploration of emotionality in the Greek media during the crisis, Davou and Demertzis (2013) mapped the collective emotions available in news headlines featured in the Greek public sphere during the financial crisis. They highlight the negative and but also action-limiting nature of these emotions, expressed as collective anxiety, fear, shame and very often despair. In our study of opinion pieces in the Greek press we extend this work by providing an overview of the individual, social and collective emotions prominent in the public sphere during the same period. The novelty of our work is three-fold. We aim to systematically capture the affective content of political communication messages at individual, social and collective levels. We identify their transformation or continuation over time. And we explain how they fit in a pattern of social affectivity during the crisis. Going beyond what is being said about the political events and actors marking the crisis, to what is being said about their emotional footprint allows us to get closer to the understanding of how elites and citizens experienced the changing political reality in hard times, and attempted to manage it in their hearts and minds.

The media coverage of the Greek debt crisis in news headlines was broadly classified in three stages by Davou and Demertzis (2013). Their research shows that in its early phase (December 2009–May 2010) the crisis was presented in print media outlets (with affiliations across the political spectrum) as the worst development in Greek history since the 1949 civil war, and headlines stressed the shock and traumatic nature of the crisis. In its second phase (June 2010–December 2011), media headlines captured the anger and frustration of the public which was expressed in public demonstrations and protests. During its third phase (from early 2012 onwards), Greece experienced a growing recession and citizens witnessed the inability of the political system to deal with the crisis. News headlines reflected the lack of hope, sense of helplessness and meaninglessness, but also a sense of gained efficacy after the results of the general elections (for examples of that, please refer to Table 1, column ‘Headlines’). It is interesting to observe in their study that the crisis overrides political affiliation and headlines engage in a broader debate of blame attribution in trying to assess the extent of the implications of the crisis for the political system.

Table 1. Timeline of emotionality, protagonists of blame and newspaper headlines. Dates

Emotions

Public agenda focus

Protagonists of blame

Headlines

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