In how far does the politicization of Eurozone crisis policies differ in Germany and Greece and over time? What explains these differences?
Politicization describes a societal process of transforming seemingly a-political matters into the objects of public controversy which involves an increasing issue salience, an expansion of debates beyond a narrow circle of actors and processes of actor polarization. Degree and direction of these three sub-processes are described and explained by two dimensions, derived from the political opportunity structure approach and the deprivation approach: Firstly, the institutionalized openness of the political system and secondly, the socio-economic and political crisis impacts. First results surprisingly suggest a strong but rather domestically oriented politicization of Eurozone crisis policies in Greece with relatively little reference to European institutions.
Beyond its empirical contribution, the paper proposes an innovative operationalization of politicization which focuses on the contested debate about the public attribution of responsibility. Claims about who is responsible for failures and successes in politics form the backbone of a political discourse and are the core unit of the quantitative content analysis applied in this research.
