Abstrakt
For long, the public in CEE remained mostly unconcerned over immigration due to low number of arrivals. The issue only became salient with the "refugee crisis" of 2015.
Nationalistic rhetoric and anti-immigrant sentiment overruled the political landscape as all the Visegrad countries refused the proposed European relocation scheme. In the Czech republic, immigration has repeatedly become an election issue although hardly any refugees actually arrived since 2015.
This article investigates how think tanks and NGOs shaped the public discussion on the immigration issue during the times of "crisis" (from April 2015 till March 2016) in the Czech republic. It proposes that the think tanks and NGOs played a role of the progressive actors and promoted establishment of communicative linkages between national and European level in their political claims-making, eg. addressing European actors or institutions.
Thus, they contributed to Europeanization of the national public sphere whilst other actors (government and politicians) were strengthening nationalistic framing of the issue. Since relocation scheme was a European-level decision, the links between decision-making and citizens would have been missing if the discussion was kept on the national level.
The actors studied might thus be relevant in diminishing the EU's democratic deficit. The argument is based on a representative sample of 1200 political claims selected from transcripts of the news broadcasted in the Czech public television in 2015 and 2016.
Quantitative political claims analysis (PCA) is applied to asses the level of Europeanization of each claim and compare the performance of different claimants.