A new study by Miklós Sebők, Áron Buzogány, Julia Fleischer, Theresa Gessler, Anna Takács, Sean M. Theriault and Ákos Holányi, titled “Crisis-exploitation or fear-mongering? A research agenda for the comparative study of policy crises and illiberal policy frames”, has been published in Journal of European Public Policy. The paper examines how legislative politicians in Austria, Germany, Hungary and the United States use policy crises (migration and COVID-19) to advance illiberal policy frames (IPFs). Their key finding is that the use of these illiberal frames does not closely track objective crisis metrics (such as asylum seeker numbers or COVID casualties), suggesting that the narrative strategy is one of sustained fear-mongering rather than opportunistic crisis-exploitation. The authors operationalise IPFs via a novel codebook and large-language-model text-analysis across four countries and two issues, offering a systematic research agenda for studying illiberal policy-framing.
The full study is available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13501763.2025.2583176
Sebők, M., Buzogány, Á., Fleischer, J., Gessler, T., Takács, A., Theriault, S. M. & Holányi, Á. (2025) Crisis-Exploitation or Fear-Mongering? A Research Agenda for the Comparative Study of Policy Crises and Illiberal Policy Frames, Journal of European Public Policy. DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2025.2583176.
