The State and Public Debt: News Media Narrations of Crisis in the United States and Greece

• In Event: 594 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Rhetoric as Politics

Abstract

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. and Greece occupied the center stage of world attention on public debt, and high levels of debt became a fixture of domestic political debate in both countries. These countries therefore offer good cases for a comparative study of the social construction of public debt. Focusing on the time period between 2008 and 2013, I examine 414 randomly-selected opinion articles from prominent Greek and U.S. newspapers to examine perceptions of the causes of the rise in public debt, pronouncements on its perniciousness and severity, the site at which blame is laid, and solutions proposed for the problem in the immediate and long-term economic future. I pay special attention to the content and use of moral evaluations in each country, to show how the technical complexity of public debt is reduced to simpler and more emotionally engaging accounts of what went wrong and how to fix it. By comparing shared understandings of the sources of rising public debt, its significance, and what should be done about it across my cases, I show how public debt eclipsed private debt – in reality, the most proximate cause of the crisis- as the single most pressing issue in each country. I also demonstrate how evaluations of high public debt are driven by pre-existing views of the state, and propose ways in which each particular construction of discourse prioritized certain policy prescriptions over others.

Author

• Eleni Arzoglou, Harvard University