Crisis and Stability: The Global Financial Crisis, British Broadsheet Press and the Politics of Ideational Reversion

By analysing UK media narrations surrounding the global financial crisis, this thesis presents a critical engagement with existing constructivist institutionalist literature. Through the application of a ‘dynamic tracing’ methodology to British broadsheet newspaper discourse from 2007-10, the thesis reveals three significant, and interconnected, dynamics. Firstly, it highlights the existence of ‘ideational reversion’, whereby after a short period of flux through late-2008 and early-2009, prominent discourses by and large returned to the pre-crisis status quo ante. By analysing the pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis discourse holistically, a notably higher degree of overall ideational stability is found than the existing literature suggests would be the case. Secondly, it is demonstrated that ideational disjuncture within media commentary was effectively ‘siloed’ in the financial sector, meaning that the perception of crisis did not challenge broader conceptualisations of the neo-liberal economy. Thirdly, the impact of such reversion and siloing was to provide a greater social source of legitimacy, or strategic advantage, to orthodox austerity narratives than to their Keynesian alternative. On the back of these observations, conceptual extensions are put forward that involve developing a greater focus on the ‘stickiness’ of pre-existing discourse through crisis periods.