What Are the Blames All about? Attribution Issues in the Eurozone Crisis

Existing works on claims concerning Eurozone crisis issues have focused on protest claims or selected discourse frames, mostly through qualitative analysis. This paper will offer a systematic portrait of attribution issues arising through a specific type of claims making by all actors in the public sphere, i.e. attribution of responsibility on the crisis. Attribution issues are at the core of the attribution trias: who blames whom for what. Expanding from recent works on attribution senders (Sommer et al 2014, Scholl et al, 2014), the analysis offering new binational data will illustrate the political, social, cultural and policy issues involved in Eurozone crisis related attributions by senders, from September 2009 to September 2013. The findings will shed light and enhance our understanding on the systematic processes underpinning the public attribution of responsibility in the crisis debate. The data derive from a current Greek-German project applying discursive actor attribution analysis, a content analysis approach combining features of protest event analysis, frame analysis and political claim analysis.