Page 226 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Hanspeter Kriesi

Incremental problem structures are predictable, evolve gradually, and
are well understood (based on an established policy paradigm); erup-
tive problem structures are unpredictable, involving “suddenly imposed
grievances” and not very well understood (not based on an established
policy paradigm). This criterion corresponds to one of the five issue
dimensions distinguished by Cobb and Elder (1983, 100). 11 Eruptive
issues tend to catch the public eye, which provides a strong incentive
for challengers to choose public strategies and forces decision makers
to do so, too. In eruptive issue domains, politicians cannot think twice
about policy options but have to address public concerns immediately
(Livingston 1997). By contrast, for incremental issue domains, it is eas-
ier to separate policy making from the public sphere. In such domains,
experts and technocrats play an important role. In other words, eruptive
issues are prone to symbolic politics (politique d’opinion), while incre-
mentalissuesarepronetoproblemsolving(politiquedesprobl`emes)(Leca
1996).
In each country and each issue domain, the project would then have to
identify and describe the configuration of actors – decision makers, me-
diaactors,andchallengers–andoftheirpublicstrategies.Iwouldsubmit
that this task can best be achieved by a two-pronged strategy: a combi-
nation of a political claims’ analysis (Gerhards et al. 1998; Koopmans
and Statham 1999, 2000) with a structural analysis of policy networks
(see Laumann and Pappi 1976; Kriesi 1980; Laumann and Knoke 1987;
Kriesi and Jegen 2001). While the claims analysis – a systematic, quan-
titative contents analysis of the press – allows, above all, reconstructing
the events, identifying the actors involved and their mobilizing strate-
gies, as well as determining the relevant public opinion, the interviewing
techniques of the policy network analyses serve to identify the coalitional
structures and to evaluate the strategies and the influence of the different
actors. Finally, the secondary analysis of existing surveys could provide
an additional idea of the issue-specific public opinions as measured by
the polls. 12

11 Cobb and Elder call this dimension “categorical precedence” and distinguish between
“routine” and “extraordinary” issues. They refer to Lowi (122), who had already
maintained in 1964 that this is the most important of all the issue characteristics.
12 I might add that an internationally comparative research proposal involving nine
countries from Western and Central Europe that was based on these general ideas
was presented to the fifth framework program of the European Union (EU) in early
2002, but was rejected. The anonymous reviewers thought that the proposal was too
expensive and too risky!

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