Framing employment relations in Western Europe

Abstract

During the past few decades, frame analysis has become a popular concept in political communication studies as a tool for understanding underlying beliefs and motives in public conflicts. The study of conflicts focusing on labor market reforms has even longer been of pivotal concern for several other social science sub-disciplines such as research on the welfare state. We try to combine these research traditions with a newspaper content analysis conducted in the U.K., France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria. The framing of employment relations varies across countries as could be expected on the basis of their historical legacies of politico-economic coordination, but only if we take the presence and degree of pressure for liberalizing reforms into account. Furthermore, the results show that, on both the political left and right, mainstream actors must be distinguished from challengers to explain actor-specific differences.