Table of Contents
Dramatic episodes in the life of a polity such as financial crises and major recessions can cast long shadows on the polities in which they occur (Birkland 1997, 2006; Baumgartner and Jones 1993, 2002; Lomborg 2004; Posner 2004).[1] The sense of threat and uncertainty they induce can profoundly impact people’s understanding of the world around them. The occurrence of a large-scale emergency or the widespread use of the emotive labels such as ‘crisis’, ‘scandal’ or ‘fiasco’ to denote a particular state of affairs or trend in the public domain implies a ‘dislocation’ of hitherto dominant social, political or administrative discourses (Wagner-Pacifici 1986, 1994; Howarth et al. 2000). When a crisis de-legitimises the power and authority relationships that these discourses underpin, structural change is desired and expected by many (’t Hart 1993).
Such change can happen, but not necessarily so. In fact, the dynamics and outcomes of crisis episodes are hard to predict. For example, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder miraculously emerged as the winner of the national elections after his well-performed role as the nation’s symbolic ‘crisis manager’ during the riverine floods in 2002, yet the Spanish Prime Minister suffered a stunning electoral loss in the immediate aftermath of the Madrid train bombings of 2004. Former US President George W. Bush saw his hitherto modest approval ratings soar in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but an already unpopular Bush Administration lost further prestige in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Likewise, public institutions can be affected quite differently in the aftermath of critical events: some take a public beating and are forced to reform (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA] after the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters); some weather the political storm (the Belgian gendarmerie after its spectacular failure to effectively police the 1985 European Cup Final at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels); others become symbolic of heroic public service (the New York City Fire Department after 9/11).
The same goes for public policies and programs. Gun-control policy in Australia was rapidly and drastically tightened after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania. Legislation banning ‘dangerous dogs’ was rapidly enacted in the United Kingdom after a few fatal biting incidents (Lodge and Hood 2002). And 9/11 produced a worldwide cascade of national policy reforms in areas such as policing, immigration, data protection and criminal law—for good or bad (cf. Klein 2007; Wolf 2007). In other cases, however, big emergencies can trigger big investigations and temporarily jolt political agendas but in the end do not result in major policy changes.
What explains these different outcomes? Most scholars writing about the nexus between crises, disasters and public policy note their potential agenda-setting effects, but have not developed explanations for their contingent nature and their variable impacts (Primo and Cobb 2003; Birkland 2006). The emerging literature on blame management has only just begun to address the mechanisms determining the fate of office-holders in the wake of major disturbances and scandals (Hood et al. 2007).
This literature suggests that the process of crisis exploitation could help to explain the variance in outcomes. Disruptions of societal routines and expectations open up two types of space for actors inside and outside government. First, crises can be used as political weapons. Crises mobilise the mass media, which will put an intense spotlight on the issues and actors involved. To the extent that they generate victims, damage and/or community stress, the government of the day is challenged to step in and show it can muster an effective, compassionate, sensible response. At the same time, it might face critical questions about its role in the very occurrence of the crisis. Why did it not prevent the crisis from happening? How well prepared was it for this type of contingency? Was it asleep at the wheel or simply overpowered by overwhelming forces outside its sphere of influence? In political terms, crises challenge actors inside and outside government to weave persuasive narratives about what is happening and what is at stake, why it is happening, how they have acted in the lead-up to the present crisis and how they propose we should deal with and learn from the crisis moving forward. Those whose narratives are considered persuasive stand to gain prestige and support; those who are found wanting can end up as scapegoats.
Second, crises help ‘de-institutionalise’ hitherto taken-for-granted policy beliefs and practices (Boin and ’t Hart 2003). The more severe a current crisis is perceived to be, and the more it appears to be caused by foreseeable and avoidable problems in the design or implementation of the policy itself, the bigger is the opportunity space for critical reconsideration of current policies and the successful advancement of (radical) reform proposals (Keeler 1993; Birkland 2006; Klein 2007). By their very occurrence (provided they are widely felt and labelled as such), crises tend to benefit critics of the status quo: experts, ideologues and advocacy groups already on record as challenging established but now compromised policies. They also present particular opportunities to newly incumbent office-holders, who cannot be blamed for present ‘messes’ but who can use these messes to highlight the need for policy changes they might have been seeking to pursue anyway.
The key currency of crisis management in the political and policy arenas is persuasion. More specifically, this study presumes that crises can be usefully understood in terms of framing contests—battles between competing definitions of the situation—between the various actors that seek to contain or exploit crisis-induced opportunity space for political posturing and policy change (cf. Alink et al. 2001). [2]
Crises invite four types of framing efforts, concerning 1) the nature and severity of a crisis, 2) its causes, 3) the responsibility for its occurrence or escalation, and 4) its policy implications. Actors inside and outside government will strive to have their particular interpretations of the crisis accepted in the media and by the public as the authoritative account (’t Hart 1993; Tarrow 1994; Brändström and Kuipers 2003; De Vries 2004; see also Stone 2001). In other words, they seek to ‘exploit’ the disruption of ‘governance as usual’ that emergencies and disturbances entail: to defend and strengthen their positions and authority, to attract or deflect public attention, to get rid of old policies and sow the seeds of new ones (Keeler 1993). When a particular ‘crisis narrative’ takes hold, it can be an important force for non-incremental changes in policy fields that are normally stabilised by the forces of path dependence, inheritance and veto-playing (Hay 2002; Kay 2006; Kuipers 2006).
This chapter provides the analytical framework that has guided this comparative study of leader rhetoric and media responses to that rhetoric during the escalation stage of the global economic downturn. We place this rhetoric within the broader context of what we have elsewhere referred to as crisis exploitation (Boin et al. 2009). We define crisis exploitation as the purposeful utilisation of crisis-type rhetoric to significantly alter levels of political support for incumbent public office-holders and existing public policies and their alternatives. By studying and interpreting leaders’ crisis rhetoric through this lens, we seek to open the ‘black box’ of politico-strategic crisis management (rather than its operational management, which is the focus of the bulk of existing research on emergencies and crises).
In formal terms, the ultimate explanandum of the study of the rhetoric of crisis exploitation is twofold: the nature and depth of changes in political support for key public office-holders and/or agencies; and the nature and degree of policy change in the wake of an emergency/disturbance. [3] Its triggering condition is the occurrence of non-routine, disruptive incidents or trends: the cascade of ‘bad news’ about the state of US financial institutions, the housing markets and its national economy, eventually spilling over into financial institutions and macroeconomic indicators worldwide. The focus of our analytical attention, however, lies with what happens in between; how these adverse events are ‘framed’ (that is, given meaning) by key public leaders.
[1] This chapter is based on Boin et al. (2009), but is significantly abridged, adapted and expanded on here.
[2] Our notion of frames follows that of Entman (1993:52), who argues that ‘to frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation’.
[3] These dimensions can be tightly connected, as when the political demise of key office-holders removes the main champion of a particular policy from the political scene. In many cases, however, the ‘programmatic’ (policy-focused) and ‘political’ (office-holders-focused) dimensions of policy evaluation and political accountability episodes appear to be completely unrelated. See Bovens et al. (2001).