Crisis? What crisis? Social policy when crises are and are not crises in Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia

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Authors

SAXONBERG Steven SIROVÁTKA Tomáš CSUDAI Eduard

Year of publication 2024
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source Social Policy & Administration
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Social Studies

Citation
Web článek - open access
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/spol.13004
Keywords Central Europe; crisis; path dependency; window of opportunity
Attached files
Description In this article, we analyse how different governments have dealt with situations, labelled as ‘crises’ in the international and national discourses. More specifically, we analyse how the Czech, Hungarian and Slovak governments framed and dealt with their social policies during the 2008 ‘financial crisis’, the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’, and the 2020 ‘Covid crisis’. We argue that sometimes governments and the mass media frame the situation as a crisis, when objectively it would be hard to argue empirically that there really was a crisis. At other times, according to objective criteria, there is ample evidence that there is indeed a crisis, but the government tries to deny it for political reasons. Despite differences in objective conditions and differences in political constellations, none of the policymakers in the three countries took advantage of the windows of opportunity that the alleged crises presented to carry out path-changing social policy? changes. Instead, the changes we rather small and usually only temporary; thus, showing the importance of path dependency even during crisis situations.
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