(De)Politicizing the Eurozone Crisis : Comparative Analysis of Political Parties Discourses on European Integration in Ireland and the United Kingdom

The recent crisis that has badly hurt the european economy was also a storm for the political sphere. That specific context presents the opportunity to study the concept of politicization. The literature in this field underlines that there is a differentiated politicization between the differents spheres (institutionnal, citizens,…) and the different countries. (De Wilde, Leupold, Schmidtke 2015). This litterature concludes in particular to the need to study intermediate factors of politicization. (Zürn, 2015)

This paper will present the results of a research building on a comparative and mixed-methods design. It aims for a better understanding of the differentiated politicization of European integration. Combining the analysis of a contextual factor, the Eurozone crisis, to the analysis of national political parties discourses, this paper will focus on one important « shadow zone » of European integration (de)politicization process: the importance of intermediate factors of (de)politicization.

In order to understand the sources of (de)politicization of European integration, the analysis will focus on national political parties' role, mobilizing on the one hand qualitative methods (discourse analysis) and on the other hand quantitative methods, using data bases (CHES, CCS, CMP).

A comparison will be conducted between Ireland and the United Kingdom. Ireland is a member of the eurozone and has suffered during the crisis, but is usually seen as a pro-european state. The United Kingdom was, before the brexit, in the opposite situation : not member of eurozone (but still in the EU), suffered less during the crisis and usually seen as eurosceptic.