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Country crises can provoke damages to a country's economic activity and citizens in a way that will always demand a deeper understanding of their determinants. Political issues are commonly mentioned as an important factor boosting these crises. This paper investigates the political factors behind financial crises and recessions.

Using variables from the ICRG rating system, logistic panel regressions are run to determine whether or not the political risk variables explain country crises.

Results disclose the importance of socioeconomic conditions to financial crises and recessions with no influence from the political arena. Against expectations, political instability does not help to explain crises. Political risk ratings also show their importance, demonstrating that the higher is the risk, the higher is the probability of debt and currency crises occurrence.

The findings in this paper contribute to a growing literature of political risk and crises, enhancing the value of political risk assessment and increasing the application of its consequences.

Since 2008, Greece has been spiralling down an economic and socio-political crisis. Over the past decade, it has endured massive riots, consecutive elections, a debilitating public debt, and endless rescue plans by the EU and other international bodies. The crisis sparked an intense interest in the Greek public discourse, which is often accused of being dominated by populist rhetoric. This interest appears to be accompanied predominantly by a certain leitmotif: instead of appreciating the assistance offered, the Greek people resent it and taking refuge in populist rhetoric, further undermining the country’s stability. This echoes the age-old argument that ‘the people are an irrational mob acting impulsively, a lamentable state that should be cured or disciplined.’ Could the shaming, the appeal to sober morality – branding all other discourses as populist and dangerous – be the fashionable response of a cosmopolitan elite, high-profile pundits and institutions to the problems of global capitalism? The debate raged in the public sphere and in the streets of Athens. On multiple occasions, the crisis was used as a trope in the European public sphere to justify socio-political changes, austerity measures and disciplinary actions. The emerging schema juxtaposed populist/anti-populist discourses, reducing discourses and identities to black and white. This chapter reads discursive constructions of the Greek crisis, by-stepping the populist/anti-populist divide. Using analysis based on affect theory and the philosophy of emotions, it investigates the various uses of resentment as part of affective engineering and as an instrument of collective identification, in an environment of multiple overlapping crises in Europe.

Political parties frequently engage in exclusionary narratives resulting in a game of blame-shifting. While this is understandably part of political life, claiming responsibility is decreasing and blame attribution is increasing in times of crisis as political actors seek to minimise political cost and rally supporters. Crises also create fertile ground for polarisation as affected citizens look for quick solutions and are driven to the extremes of the political spectrum. That effect has been demonstrated in Greece (Capelos & Exadaktylos, 2017; Vasilopoulou et al., 2014): political parties in the first years of the Greek financial crisis (2009–2012) engaged in an endless game of blame-shifting and exclusion, which was replicated within opinion pieces within mainstream press. This resulted in the polarisation of society with new political cleavages emerging, most notably on the pro/antiausterity divide. Within the context of this divide populist rhetoric assisted exclusion as the two sides tried to demarcate boundaries, identify allies and enemies and reinforce a ‘Them’ vs ‘Us’ dichotomy to consolidate their identities.

This chapter assesses how embedded this divide has become in setting up the electoral campaigns for the 2019 General Election between the two main contenders, Syriza and New Democracy in the way they projected their political narrative in the public sphere. Using substantive content analysis of framing, this chapter collected opinion pieces written from the day the election was announced (26 May) to day after the result (8 July) in two newspapers: New Democracy–leaning Kathimerini and Syriza-leaning Avgi. This chapter identified the blame frames of the two sides and assessed polarisation by coding for the tone of references using an exclusivity index as developed by Vasilopoulou et al. (2014). The findings suggest that both newspapers engaged in a race of blame, bringing the political debate to the forefront and ensuring that polarisation was transferred into the public sphere, consolidating the ‘them’ vs ‘us’ divide.

Acknowledging the important role of the media in shaping a European public sphere, the purpose of this paper is to explore how the recent economic crisis is discursively construed in the context of the British media discourse. It investigates discursive constructions of the economic crisis in two political magazines of different ideological positioning by placing emphasis on the economic crisis in Greece, the “weak link” of the Eurozone.

The study draws on systemic functional linguistics which views language as social semiotic and conducts a transitivity analysis of a corpus consisting of 59 articles (a total of 61,820 words) from two weekly British political magazines, one of conservative and one of centre-left political position. The analysis is assisted by Wordsmith 6.0 concordance corpus tool.

It is argued that the articles of the conservative magazine construe the crisis as primarily local and financial, discussing its effects on the British economy. On the other hand, the articles of the centre-left magazine view the crisis as a systemic one derived from and, at the same time, affecting European Union policies and stress its political and economic implications in all of Eurozone.

The findings of the study contribute to the body of studies which investigate the role of language in the construction of the economic crisis and also adds to the on-going discussion regarding the development of a European public sphere as part of the wider European Project and the process of European integration.

The contribution starts out from the question whether the political legitimacy of the Third Wave democracies has suffered in the wake of the Great Recession. The expectation of a damaging effect of an economic or political crisis on legitimacy is based on Lipset’s assumption that established democracies with a high degree of political legitimacy are better capable of coping with such crises than young democracies. The database includes two surveys of members of parliament conducted in 2007 and 2013 in Sweden, Germany and five Third Wave democracies located in different world regions (Chile, South Korea, Poland, South Africa and Turkey). Waves 5 and 6 of the World Values Survey that were conducted at about the same time were used for comparing the legitimacy beliefs among MPs and citizens. The data show that the scores for all indicators of political legitimacy are higher among MPs than among citizens and that the differences between the two groups of respondents are considerably larger in the five young democracies. Confidence in political parties is fairly low, especially among citizens, while the evaluation of the quality of democracy in the respondents’ country is much higher. Both evaluations have been rather stable over time. In the two established democracies, support for democracy among citizens is nearly as high as among MPs. In the five young democracies, the MP-citizen differential is larger and support for democracy in the population shows a steady increase only in Chile, while it has remained low in Poland and Turkey and even decreased in Korea and South Africa. This indicates that democracy has not taken deep roots in four of the five new democracies included in the study. In Korea and South Africa, the decline in support for democracy started already before the onset of the economic crisis and therefore cannot be attributed to the recession. This is confirmed by the lack of a statistical relationship between political legitimacy on one side and economic evaluations on the other side. A multiple regression analysis shows strong country-specific effects, while individual-level variables have only minor effects.

This paper intends to explore the localist perspectives concerning Hong Kong’s political development. The persistent growth of localists in the polity of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) has not only challenged the current political order but also aroused Beijing’s national security considerations. The oath-taking controversies of 2016 demonstrated the strife that now exists between Beijing and the localists in Hong Kong. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the localists’ perceptions of the political decay, legitimacy crisis and reverse democratization in HKSAR to illuminate further their perceptions of Hong Kong’s political development.

This paper uses the theoretical discussion of the relations between political decay, legitimacy, the legitimacy crisis and reverse democratization as the key analytical framework to understand the localists’ perspective concerning Hong Kong’s political development. Based on an analysis of the localists’ discourse, the implication for the HKSAR regime’s legitimacy and for reverse democratization will be discussed.

The emergence of the new localists leads to the belief that Hong Kong’s political development is experiencing the reverse of democratization as the government cannot fully absorb the demands made by the general public. The reverse democratization is directly impacting the regime’s legitimacy, but in the HKSAR’s case, the new localists see the root of the problem as stemming from Beijing, that is that the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy problem is due to its underdevelopment in the legal, political and cultural spheres. This underdevelopment has weakened the legitimacy of the HKSAR’s administration, especially with regard to political reform, the legal interpretation of the Basic Law, and the influx of immigrants and tourists from the Mainland into the Hong Kong’s society. The China factor, from the Localists’ viewpoint, is at the root of the political decay and the legitimacy crisis in Hong Kong. More significantly, the localists regard the involvement of Beijing in Hong Kong’s affairs as its way to disrupt the autonomous status of the HKSAR. As a result, public discontent has further intensified and created the legitimacy crisis for the HKSAR Government.

This paper is the first academic paper to provide a critical analysis of Hong Kong’s localists’ views regarding Hong Kong’s political development since becoming the HKSAR. In contrast with the existing literature about Hong Kong’s democratization and political development, this paper introduces localists’ views and advocates the idea of “reverse democratization” to explain their perceptions concerning Hong Kong’s political development.

Hit by an unprecedented financial crisis, the Greek society has been also swept away by an acute political crisis, rising political polarisation and social unrest. At the same time, over the last decade, Greece has faced an unparalleled state of emergency, with thousands of refugees and immigrants entering every year and remaining in the country, often in extremely difficult living conditions leading to ‘an exceptional crisis within the crisis’. In fact, during the recent years, immigration and the ‘refugee crisis’ have been among the most controversial topics on the Greek policy agenda and one of the principal issues that shapes public discourse and raises the most questions about social cohesion and the fundamental values of the Greek society. Media representations of the refugee and migrant ‘crisis’ have played a significant role in how this controversial issue is presented in the Greek public discourse as well as in how people perceive and respond to it. Within this context and having as a starting point the theoretical approach of peace journalism, this chapter explores the ways in which four national Greek newspapers portrayed immigration within different periods of the Greek crisis between January 2011 and September 2015. Research results reveal two different periods in the analysed news stories, one between 2011 and 2014, when immigration was portrayed as a ‘domestic problem’ and the other, in 2015, when the situation was designated as a ‘European refugee crisis’. In both cases, however, it was evident that immigration was positioned high on the agenda of the Greek newspapers, despite major political events taking place within the same periods. Findings were presented and discussed on four different but interrelated levels: immigration (1) as a source of conflict and polarisation, (2) as a political issue, (3) through securitisation and victimhood and, ultimately, (4) through a ‘journalism of conventions’ lens, with very important consequences on the quality of information (extensive lack of solutions related to immigration and asylum issues, absence of refugees' voice, insufficient context, among others).