Hanspeter Kriesi

European University Institute | EUI · Department of Political and Social Sciences

This chapter presents the theoretical framework that is applied in the study. We expect the management of the refugee crisis to be heavily shaped by the underlying political conflicts in the compound EU polity of nation-states, by the crisis situation that prevailed as a result of the policy-specific heritage, and the combination of problem and pol...

In this chapter, we take a closer look at the cross-level episodes, which include roughly half of the national episodes of our study. This is a remarkably high share, which indicates that national asylum policymaking is taking place in the shadow of EU policymaking. These episodes have been more intensely politicized than purely domestic episodes....

This chapter introduces the forty-six policy episodes that we study in detail. We present their timing, their politicization, and their substantive focus. The association between politicization and pressure, both problem and political pressures, proves to be rather variable across member states and looser than expected. We account for this finding...

This chapter highlights the importance of government composition in explaining the nature of domestic conflict in the refugee crisis. It puts into evidence two important aspects of this composition: fragmentation and ideology. Most of the governments in our study are coalition governments and therefore should not be treated as unitary actors. The t...

This chapter studies the dynamics of elite support, which varies considerably across time. This temporal fluctuations are explained by three different sets of variables: the changing political and problem pressure that governments face, the contextual characteristics that may moderate this relationship, and the endogenous dynamics unfolding between...

By applying a combination of tools from comparative politics and policy analysis to the study of policymaking in the EU polity, we showed how, in the absence of generally accepted rules, EU policymaking in the refugee crisis developed in an uncoordinated, ad hoc way that served to poison transnational relationships among member states beyond the na...

This chapter presents the argument that the domestic responses to the refugee crisis in the period between 2013 and 2020 exposed vastly different conflict lines running through European societies. In particular, we argue that the integration–demarcation cleavage that rose to prominence in the context of the refugee crisis triggered four types of co...

This chapter presents the institutional preconditions and crisis situation at the EU level and in four types of member states – frontline, transit, open destination, and closed destination states. We show the configuration of interests among these states based on these preconditions and the likely outcomes that derive from them. Given the cumulatio...

This chapter studies the electoral repercussions of the refugee crisis, tentatively showing that in elections close to the epicenter of events, either the right or the radical right were the grand winners from this turbulence. First, we examine the politicization of the issue of migration generally in European party-systems, exploring whether the E...

In this chapter, we describe the main elements of our empirical design for studying the refugee crisis. In the first part of the chapter, we describe our case selection, which involves two steps. In the first step, we classify EU member states into five main types: frontline, transit, open destination, closed destination, and bystander states. In t...

This chapter examines how the refugee crisis was framed and portrayed by right-wing actors. Its main puzzle is how the initially sentimental, humanitarian approach to the coverage of the refugee crisis was gradually transformed to present refugees as an existential threat to European societies. We track the frames and themes utilized by mainstream...

In this chapter, we show how an EU policymaking episode, the EU–Turkey agreement, the most important episode in our study, is domesticated in national policymaking and how this works out differently depending on the member state. We compare the debates in four member states and then zoom in on the debates in the two most concerned member states. Fo...

This chapter presents the conflict structure at the EU level. International conflicts prevailed, and they were mainly of three types – vertical conflicts between the EU and its member states, transnational conflicts between member states, and externalization conflicts between the EU/member states and third countries. Other types of conflicts were s...

In this chapter we look at the transnational and domestic conflict configurations among the citizen publics of sixteen member states. In terms of transnational conflicts, we find the expected opposition between the frontline states (Greece, Italy) and the V4 countries (augmented by eastern European bystander states). The contrasting stance of the p...

We study whether and how governments influence public opinion about immigration policies in Europe. At the European level, conflicts about policy are generally territorial in nature – that is, they involve conflicts between member states, which are represented by their governments. Distinguishing between four types of situations, depending on wheth...

We study how crises situations shape the political decision-making structure of the EU and the responses adopted by European policy makers by comparing EU decision-making in the first wave of the COVID-19 crisis (March 2020-July 2020) and in the refugee crisis (2015 to 2019), based on a new data-set on policymaking. Similarities between the two cri...

What has caused the marked, cross-national, and unprecedented trends in European electoral results in the 21st century? Scholarly explanations include social structure and challenger party entrepreneurship. We argue that these electoral changes more proximally result from public issue salience, which results from societal trends and mainly affects...

The EU is still fragile after its long decade of crises since 2008, and its durability remains an open question. New capacities were created during this time. But it is not clear how robust they are and whether developing them further will encounter insurmountable obstacles, including resentment by citizens. Over time, tensions and disagreements un...

Based on an original protest event analysis (PEA) dataset covering 30 European countries, this paper provides three sets of results. Despite its unlikeliness due to lockdowns and social distancing measures, protest during COVID-19 has hardly been put to a halt even if, as a result of the restrictions imposed by the lockdown measures on the opportun...

Based on extensive data and analysis of sixty contentious episodes in twelve European countries, this book proposes a novel approach that takes a middle ground between narrative approaches and conventional protest event analysis. Looking particularly at responses to austerity policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2008–2015), the authors...

Based on extensive data and analysis of sixty contentious episodes in twelve European countries, this book proposes a novel approach that takes a middle ground between narrative approaches and conventional protest event analysis. Looking particularly at responses to austerity policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2008–2015), the authors...

Based on extensive data and analysis of sixty contentious episodes in twelve European countries, this book proposes a novel approach that takes a middle ground between narrative approaches and conventional protest event analysis. Looking particularly at responses to austerity policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2008–2015), the authors...

Based on extensive data and analysis of sixty contentious episodes in twelve European countries, this book proposes a novel approach that takes a middle ground between narrative approaches and conventional protest event analysis. Looking particularly at responses to austerity policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2008–2015), the authors...

On 24 May 2011, in the middle of the parliamentary debate on the so-called mid-term adjustment plan, yet another round of austerity imposed by Greece’s international creditors, a call for a demonstration at Syntagma Square in Athens and at the White Tower in Thessaloniki appeared on Facebook. By the next day at least 20,000 people assembled in the...

Based on extensive data and analysis of sixty contentious episodes in twelve European countries, this book proposes a novel approach that takes a middle ground between narrative approaches and conventional protest event analysis. Looking particularly at responses to austerity policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2008–2015), the authors...

Based on extensive data and analysis of sixty contentious episodes in twelve European countries, this book proposes a novel approach that takes a middle ground between narrative approaches and conventional protest event analysis. Looking particularly at responses to austerity policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2008–2015), the authors...

Based on extensive data and analysis of sixty contentious episodes in twelve European countries, this book proposes a novel approach that takes a middle ground between narrative approaches and conventional protest event analysis. Looking particularly at responses to austerity policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2008–2015), the authors...

Based on extensive data and analysis of sixty contentious episodes in twelve European countries, this book proposes a novel approach that takes a middle ground between narrative approaches and conventional protest event analysis. Looking particularly at responses to austerity policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2008–2015), the authors...

Based on extensive data and analysis of sixty contentious episodes in twelve European countries, this book proposes a novel approach that takes a middle ground between narrative approaches and conventional protest event analysis. Looking particularly at responses to austerity policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2008–2015), the authors...

Based on extensive data and analysis of sixty contentious episodes in twelve European countries, this book proposes a novel approach that takes a middle ground between narrative approaches and conventional protest event analysis. Looking particularly at responses to austerity policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2008–2015), the authors...

Based on extensive data and analysis of sixty contentious episodes in twelve European countries, this book proposes a novel approach that takes a middle ground between narrative approaches and conventional protest event analysis. Looking particularly at responses to austerity policies in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2008–2015), the authors...

Previous studies have applied theories of European integration to interpret crisis-led policymaking processes and integration outcomes in the EU. However, there has been little attempt to appraise the analytical leverage offered by major integration theories as a function of different crisis pressures. We theorize that diverse combinations of crisi...

The COVID-19 crisis has demanded that governments take restrictive measures that are abnormal for most representative democracies. This article aims to examine the determinants of the public’s evaluations towards those measures. This article focuses on political trust and partisanship as potential explanatory factors of evaluations of each governme...

Protest event analysis is a key method to study social movements, allowing to systematically analyze protest events over time and space. However, the manual coding of protest events is time-consuming and resource intensive. Recently, advances in automated approaches offer opportunities to code multiple sources and create large data sets that span m...

We present the reaction of the EU and eight member states to the refugee crisis 2015/16 as a case of ‘defensive integration’. In the absence of a joint EU solution, the member states were left to their own devices and took a series of national measures that varied from one country to the other, depending on their policy heritage, and the combinatio...

The article examines the politicisation of immigration in Europe during the so-called migration crisis. Based on original media data, it traces politicisation during national election campaigns in 15 countries from the 2000s up to 2018. The study covers Northwestern (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland), Cen...

During the Great Recession, governments across the continent implemented austerity policies. A large literature claims that such policies are surprisingly popular and have few electoral costs. This article revisits this question by studying the popularity of governments during the economic crisis. The authors assemble a pooled time-series data set...

The chapter establishes that economic and political grievances matter for economic protest in general and public economic protest in particular. In addition, it shows that, during the period covered, political grievances have been strongly influenced by economic grievances across Europe, but most clearly in southern Europe. While the rapid recovery...

Cambridge Core - European Studies - Contention in Times of Crisis - edited by Hanspeter Kriesi

How can democracies effectively represent citizens? The goal of this Handbook is to evaluate comprehensively how well the interests and preferences of mass publics become represented by institutions in liberal democracies. It first explores how the idea and institutions of liberal democracies were formed over centuries and became enshrined in Weste...

This paper discusses the current prospects of democracy in Europe from four perspectives: the birdʼs-eye view of long-term trends; the perspective of citizens’ support of democratic principles and their dissatisfaction with the way democracy works in their own countries; the voters’ perspective, which points to the rise of populist challengers in r...

This paper studies the interactions between governments, challengers and third party actors in the context of 60 contentious policy episodes in 12 European countries during the Great Recession. More specifically, we focus on the endogenous dynamics that develop in the course of these episodes. Based on the combination of a new event dataset, which...

We start by tracing the origins of modern-day direct democracy back to the ideas of participatory democrats, and we give a systematic overview of the different forms of direct democratic practices existing today, as well as of the main criticisms of direct democracy. Next, we review existing empirical evidence on some of the crucial debates surroun...

This paper links the consequences of the Great Recession on protest and electoral politics. It innovates by combining the literature on economic voting with social movement research and by presenting the first integrated, large‐scale empirical analysis of protest mobilisation and electoral outcomes in Europe. The economic voting literature offers i...

We introduce a set of concepts and general guidelines for what we call Contentious Episode Analysis (CEA). In the footsteps of Dynamics of Contention (DoC), we attempt to develop a conceptual framework that improves upon the concepts originally introduced by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001). Our analytical strategy is similar to that of DoC in that...

Zusammenfassung In diesem Beitrag skizzieren wir eine Forschungsagenda, die der Frage nachgeht wie sich die Interaktionen zwischen Bewegungen und Parteien sowohl quantitativ als auch qualitativ unter Bedingungen funktionierender repräsentativer Verbindungen einerseits und einer Repräsentationskrise andererseits unterscheiden. Die zentrale These lau...

This comprehensive study of party competition in Europe since 2008 aids understanding of the recent, often dramatic, changes taking place in European politics. It addresses how the multiple crises that Europe faces have affected the intensity and structure of party competition, and whether we are seeing a wave of 'critical elections' which will res...

European Party Politics in Times of Crisis - edited by Swen Hutter and Hanspeter Kriesi June 2019

European Party Politics in Times of Crisis - edited by Swen Hutter and Hanspeter Kriesi June 2019

This paper starts from the premise that European integration is part and parcel of a new struc-turing conflict that involves a set of processes which put the national political community under strain. This structuring conflict has been emerging long before the Euro and refugee crises. However, the crises may have reinforced and potentially reshaped...

The article comparatively examines the levels of populism exhibited by parties in Western Europe. It relies on a quantitative content analysis of press releases collected in the context of 11 national elections between 2012 and 2015. In line with the first hypothesis, the results show that parties from both the radical right and the radical left ma...

In 2008 the world experienced the Great Recession, a financial and economic crisis of enormous proportions and the greatest economic downturn since the 1930s. In its wake, unemployment became a key preoccupation of West European publics and politicians. This comparative study considers the policy debates surrounding unemployment in the United Kingd...

Do voters punish governments more severely during international economic crises or do they discount exogenous shocks as they recognize the government’s limited “room of manoeuvre”? The current literature provides conflicting answers to this question. This study argues that in such contexts citizens’ economic perceptions are less likely to predict t...

The literature on the interplay of social movements and political parties is growing as sociologists regain interest in political parties and political scientists pay closer attention to citizens’ discontent and its various political expressions. This chapter discusses the role of political parties and social movements as key actors for democratic...

This essay makes another attempt to clarify the concept of populism and to discuss its causes and consequences. It argues that, at its core, the concept of populism refers to an ‘ideology,’ i.e. a set of beliefs about how democracy works and how it ought to work. It links this core concept to other, related notions of populism, which it considers c...

The article focuses on the party political spaces in four Southern European countries (i.e. Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) since the onset of the Euro crisis. To understand the emerging conflict structures, it argues for the need to consider that these countries simultaneously face an economic crisis and a political crisis and that both crises...

Der Parteienwettbewerb hat sich in Nordwesteuropa seit den 1980er Jahren sowohl mit Blick auf die Inhalte als auch die Akteurskonfiguration stark gewandelt. Vor dem Hintergrund dieser langfristigen Veränderungen konzentriert sich der vorliegende Beitrag auf die Frage, welche Auswirkungen die große Rezession und die Eurokrise auf die Strukturierung...

Το πρώτο μέρος τον κειμένου εξετάζει τις κοινές κοινωνικές, πολιτισμικές και πολιτικές ρίζες των νέων κοινωνικών κινημάτων, τα οποία παίζουν έναν κρίσιμο ρόλο στο χώρο των κοινωνικών κινημάτων στις περισσότερες δυτικοευρωπαϊκές χώρες κατά τις δεκαετίες ’70 και ’80. Υποστηρίζεται ότι όλα αυτά τα κινήματα έχουν τις ρίζες τους σε ένα βασικό ανταγωνισμ...

The question of whether European democracy is in crisis is not new, but is posed in a new way in the shadow of the euro crisis. In the tradition of the studies of democratic support and disaffection and based on data from the European Social Survey 2012, this article analyses the conceptions and evaluations of democracy in the different regions of...

Der European Survey 6 von 2012 erlaubt einen differenzierten Einblick, wie die Europäer heute über die Demokratie denken und wie sie die Demokratie in ihrem eigenen Land beurteilen. Dieser Beitrag gibt dazu einen kurzen Überblick Diese ersten Ergebnisse bestätigen die Optimisten, mindestens was das Basismodell der liberalen Demokratie angeht: Die E...

How do party cues and policy information affect citizens’ political opinions? In direct democratic settings, this question is particularly relevant. Direct democratic campaigns are information-rich events which offer citizens the opportunity to learn detailed information about a policy. At the same time parties try to influence citizens’ decision p...

We present a corpus for protest event min- ing that combines token-level annotation with the event schema and ontology of entities and events from protest research in the social sci- ences. The dataset uses newswire reports from the English Gigaword corpus. The token-level annotation is inspired by annotation standards for event extraction, in part...

This article investigates the link between attitude formation at the national and the supranational level of the European Union (EU). While the existing studies have provided strong evidence that attitudes towards national institutions fundamentally condition attitudes towards the EU, the mechanisms through which these spillovers occur are not clea...

Politicising Europe presents the most comprehensive contribution to empirical research on politicisation to date. The study is innovative in both conceptual and empirical terms. Conceptually, the contributors develop and apply a new index and typology of politicisation. Empirically, the volume presents a huge amount of original data, tracing politi...

This paper analyses how disaffection with the EU influenced individuals' likelihood of turning out to vote and of casting a vote for a Eurosceptic party in the 2014 EP elections, and how these relationships were moderated by the Eurosceptic partisan supply of each country. We argue that the degree to which political parties oppose European integrat...

Politicising Europe presents the most comprehensive contribution to empirical research on politicisation to date. The study is innovative in both conceptual and empirical terms. Conceptually, the contributors develop and apply a new index and typology of politicisation. Empirically, the volume presents a huge amount of original data, tracing politi...

Politicising Europe presents the most comprehensive contribution to empirical research on politicisation to date. The study is innovative in both conceptual and empirical terms. Conceptually, the contributors develop and apply a new index and typology of politicisation. Empirically, the volume presents a huge amount of original data, tracing politi...

Politicising Europe presents the most comprehensive contribution to empirical research on politicisation to date. The study is innovative in both conceptual and empirical terms. Conceptually, the contributors develop and apply a new index and typology of politicisation. Empirically, the volume presents a huge amount of original data, tracing politi...

In 2008, Western economies were shaken by the burst of the housing bubble in the USA and since then Europe is caught in the Great Recession. Many European countries have been confronted with a long-lasting economic recession with, in some countries, limited prospects of improvement for a foreseeable future (e.g., Kahler and Lake 2013; Schäfer and S...

In this conclusion, I attempt to provide a synthesis of the findings of this superb set of papers and put them into a broader perspective. For this purpose, I also rely on some other more recent assessments of Swiss politics - in particular on Sciarini, Fischer and Traber's (2015) replication of my own study of Swiss politics in the 1970s, which co...