The sheer scale of the on-going financial crisis has had profound ramifications in many spheres of political life. Whether these will lead to a political paradigm shift remains open to question, but certainly some scholars have argued that the discourses associated with the crisis will have a long-lasting impact on politics (see for example Hay, 2012). This paper seeks to understand both the scope and significance of one important change that has occurred since 2008 by examining how politicians communicated the nature of the crisis to the electorate, and constructed a narrative around it.
Using a mixed method technique encompassing quantitative content analysis and qualitative thematic analysis, this paper will examine the evolution of economic crisis related political communication in three countries: the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland. It will seek to address three research questions. First, it will focus on how politicians constructed a narrative of cause and effect, and who was blamed for creating the situation. Second, it will examine how politicians articulate a vision of the future, and whether this focuses on continuing austerity or economic renaissance. Third, it will look at whether and how politicians fit the economic crisis into a broader ideological view as a mechanism for legitimising their wider political agenda. In addition, due to the nature of the sample being collected, it will be possible to offer transnational, inter-party and temporal comparisons to chart the evolution of the answers to these questions in different contexts.
