Media Representations Of Anti Austerity Protests In The Eu

This book analyzes constructions of injustice, group identification and participation in news and social media in anti-austerity protests within the European Union (EU). Since 2008, EU member-states have witnessed waves of protests and demonstrations against the adoption of austerity measures and alignment of domestic economies with the prevailing global neoliberal order. Understanding how the media represents dissent and how it influences public deliberation is of critical importance. It is accordingly necessary to explore the strategies deployed and role played by news and social media in representing and perhaps acting upon anti-austerity protests in the Eurozone crisis. This volume undertakes such a critical exploration.

The book explores the diffusion of protest against austerity and free trade agreements in the wave of contention that shook the EU following the 2008 economic crisis. It discusses how protests against austerity and free trade agreements manifested a wider discontent with the constitutionalization of economic policy and the way economic decisions have been insulated from democratic debate. It also explores the differentiated politicization of these issues and the diffusion of protests across Western as well as Eastern Europe, which has often been neglected in studies of the post-crisis turmoil. Julia Rone emphasizes that far from being an automatic spontaneous process, protest diffusion is highly complex, and its success or failure can be impacted by the strategic agency and media practices of key political players involved such as bottom-up activists, as well as trade unions, political parties, NGOs, intellectuals and mainstream media. This is an important resource for media and communications students and scholars with an interest in activism, political economy, social movement studies and protest movements.

In this book a set of theoretical and methodological resources are presented to study the way in which protest, resistance and social movement discourses circulate through society and looks at the role of media and of communication in this process. Empirically, the focus of this book is on the UK’s anti-austerity movement. ‘The Circuit of Protest’, as developed in this volume, is comprised of an analysis of the discourses of the anti-austerity movement and their corresponding movement frames, and the self-mediation practices geared at communicating these. The mainstream media representations and the reception of the movement discourses and frames by non-activist citizens are also studied. It is concluded that studying a movement through the prism of mediation provides a nuanced assessment in terms of failures and successes of the UK’s anti-austerity movement. The book is of relevance to students and researchers of politics, social movements, as well as media and communication, but also to activists.

The book explores the diffusion of protest against austerity and free trade agreements in the wave of contention that shook the EU following the 2008 economic crisis. It discusses how protests against austerity and free trade agreements manifested a wider discontent with the constitutionalization of economic policy and the way economic decisions have been insulated from democratic debate. It also explores the differentiated politicization of these issues and the diffusion of protests across Western as well as Eastern Europe, which has often been neglected in studies of the post-crisis turmoil. Julia Rone emphasizes that far from being an automatic spontaneous process, protest diffusion is highly complex, and its success or failure can be impacted by the strategic agency and media practices of key political players involved such as bottom-up activists, as well as trade unions, political parties, NGOs, intellectuals and mainstream media. This is an important resource for media and communications students and scholars with an interest in activism, political economy, social movement studies and protest movements.

Representative democracies are facing huge challenges that stem from long trends of citizens’ dissatisfaction and weakening of political legitimacy, on the one hand, and the effects of global economic and financial crisis on electoral alignments and the patterns of government, on the other. This volume uses the Portuguese case as an important case study to examine the long-term debate on the crisis of representative democracies with the attempt to assess the impact of the Great Recession. In particular, this study examines two relevant dimensions, namely citizens’ participation and mobilization, as well as longitudinal evolution of the linkages between voters and MPs, highlighting both continuities and changes. Through a wide and rich data collection and the comparative perspective adopted, this study furthers our understanding of how Portuguese democracy has bounced back and has emerged as a peculiar case among European democracies, especially if we look at innovate democratic practices - at both citizens’ and elites’ level – that have been adopted after the Great Recession.

Today, the European Union is facing a crisis as serious as anything it has experienced since its origins more than half a century ago. What makes this so serious is that it is not a single crisis but rather multiple crises – the euro crisis, the migration/refugee crisis, Brexit, etc. – that overlap and reinforce one another, creating a cumulative array of challenges that threatens the very survival of the EU. For the first time in its history, there is a real risk that the EU could break up. This volume brings together sociologists, economists and political scientists from around Europe to shed light on how the EU got into this predicament. It argues that the multiple crises that have plagued the European Union in the last decade stem to a large extent from flaws in its construction and that these flaws are consequences of the political processes that led to the formation of the EU – in other words, the decisions that made possible the development of the EU created the conditions for the multiple crises it experiences today. This timely and wide-ranging book on one of the most important issues of our time will be of great interest to students and scholars in the social sciences, to politicians and policy-makers and to anyone concerned with Europe and its future.

While the national narrative coming out of Ireland since the 2008 economic crisis has been relentlessly sanguine, fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective from both well-established and emerging authors. In Broken Irelands, McGlynn examines Irish fiction of the post-crash era, addressing the proliferation of writing that downplays realistic and grammatical coherence. Noting that these traits have the effect of diminishing human agency, blurring questions of responsibility, and emphasizing emotion over rationality, McGlynn argues that they reflect and respond to social and economic conditions during the global economic crisis and its aftermath of recession, austerity, and precarity. Rather than focusing on overt discussions of the crash and recession, McGlynn explores how the dominance of an economic worldview, including a pervasive climate of financialized discourse, shapes the way stories are told. In the writing of such authors as Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mike McCormack, and Lisa McInerney, McGlynn unpacks the ways that formal departures from realism through grammatical asymmetries like unconventional verb tenses, novel syntactic choices, and reliance on sentence fragments align with a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility.

The Oxford Handbook of Portuguese Politics brings together the best scholars in the field offering an unrivalled coverage of the politics (broadly defined) of the country over the past 50 years. The Handbook includes eight sections. First, it looks at the past and present by making an overview of Portuguese political developments since democratization in the 1970s. Second, it looks at political institutions as the building blocks of Portuguese democracy. The third section examines mass politics and voters, that is, a thorough analysis of the demand-side of mass politics. The fourth section turns to the supply side of mass-politics by looking at parties and the party system. The fifth section looks at the Portuguese society by unpacking a plethora of societal aspects with direct implications for politics. The sixth section examines governance and public policies, with a view to understanding how a constellation of public policies has an impact on the quality of governance and in fostering well-being. The seventh section looks at Portugal and the European Union. The eighth and final section unpacks Portuguese foreign policy and defence.