Political Discourse in Times of Crisis: The Impact of the 2015-2016 Refugee Crisis on the Parliamentary Discourse in the Netherlands and Greece

This thesis aims to understand the impact of the 2015-2016 refugee crisis on the parliamentary discourse in the Netherlands and Greece. It does so by drawing on Triandafyllidou’s (2018) work on media and political discourse, which proposed an important distinction between three discursive frames developed in response to the refugee crisis: 1) a moralizing frame; 2) a security frame; and 3) a rationalizing frame. The goal is to trace these frames in Dutch and Greek parliamentary debates, as parliaments have not received much attention in the academic debate. The analysis covers transcripts of plenary sessions in parliamentary debates between August 2015 and April 2016. Following the work of Triandafyllidou (2018), the key hypothesis is that the longer a refugee crisis lasts, the more parliamentary debates become dominated by a rationalizing frame, regardless of how affected countries are by refugee inflows. The findings identify that no particular frame dominated the parliamentary...Show moreThis thesis aims to understand the impact of the 2015-2016 refugee crisis on the parliamentary discourse in the Netherlands and Greece. It does so by drawing on Triandafyllidou’s (2018) work on media and political discourse, which proposed an important distinction between three discursive frames developed in response to the refugee crisis: 1) a moralizing frame; 2) a security frame; and 3) a rationalizing frame. The goal is to trace these frames in Dutch and Greek parliamentary debates, as parliaments have not received much attention in the academic debate. The analysis covers transcripts of plenary sessions in parliamentary debates between August 2015 and April 2016. Following the work of Triandafyllidou (2018), the key hypothesis is that the longer a refugee crisis lasts, the more parliamentary debates become dominated by a rationalizing frame, regardless of how affected countries are by refugee inflows. The findings identify that no particular frame dominated the parliamentary debates, indicating that political parties remained stable on the left-right dimension. Thus, against the expectations from the literature on the 2015-2016 refugee crisis, the thesis demonstrates that the refugee crisis did not impact the political discourse in EU member states.Show less

Leiden University Student Repository

Documents

In Collections

Political Discourse in Times of Crisis: The Impact of the 2015-2016 Refugee Crisis on the Parliamentary Discourse in the Netherlands and Greece