The Greek crisis as a “morality tale”? An empirical assessment
| Published date | 01 June 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14651165241234483 |
| Author | Nicola Nones |
| Date | 01 June 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The Greek crisis as a
“morality tale”?
An empirical assessment
Nicola Nones
Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of
Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Abstract
Credit and debt are more than just material exchanges within a market economy, they
are also social constructs embedded in moral judgments about the character of the
agents involved. During the recent European Sovereign Bond crisis, some commentators
noted how a similarly loaded moral media discourse juxtaposed “virtuous”Northern
European countries on the one side, and “spendthrift, lazy”Southern European ones
on the other side. In this article, I provide a quantitative large-N empirical assessment
of this phenomenon. I employ a dictionary-based approach inspired by research in social
psychology to measure moral content. Upon analyzing more than 14,000 articles pub-
lished in the Anglo-American and German financial press between 2004 and 2019,
I show the extent to which Greece was described in negative moral language. After
the initial “shock”in the fall of 2009, the average moral tone turns negative, and
more so in the German financial press relative to its Anglo-American counterpart.
Moreover, by most measures, it never completely reverts to pre-crisis levels, thus sug-
gesting how “sticky”economic narratives can become. Against the original expectations,
though, there is no evidence that the financial press framed the last and most acute
phase of the Greek crisis in 2015 in increasingly moral terms.
Keywords
European Union, Greek financial crisis, moral language, political economy of finance
Corresponding author:
Nicola Nones, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, 1 Devonshire Place,
Toronto, Ontario M5S 3K7, Canada.
Email: nn6nc@virginia.edu
Article
European Union Politics
2024, Vol. 25(2) 291–312
© The Author(s) 2024
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165241234483
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
Introduction
Credit and debt are more than just material exchanges within a market economy.
Creditor–debtor relationships are also social constructs embedded in moral judgments
about the character—the moral type—of the agents involved. This moral characterization
is rooted in a cultural and social environment that links the idea of debt to immorality
(Dyson, 2014). While the most overtly religious or philosophically laden interpretations
of debt–credit relations have faded away over time, moral language still permeates and
frames public debate on these topics (Fourcade et al., 2013). Traditionally, scholars
have analyzed the relationship between morality and debt in the context of interpersonal
relations, with individuals in the role of economic agents. Nevertheless, during the recent
European Sovereign Bond crisis, many commentators have noted how a similarly loaded
moral discourse has transcended the characterization of credit–debt relations among indi-
viduals and extended to the collective characterization of entire countries (Mylonas,
2019; Ojala and Harjuniemi, 2016; Van Vossole, 2016). A “morality tale”has ensued,
starkly dividing virtuous Northern European countries on the one side, and spendthrift
Southern European ones on the other side (Matthijs and McNamara, 2015: 230). In
turn, this moral discourse may have affected the key actors involved during and even
after the crisis. Indeed, there is some evidence suggesting that moral judgments play a
role in defining individual preferences toward financial bailouts (Rathbun et al., 2019)
and that they can attenuate altruistic motives regarding debt repayment (Del Ponte and
DeScioli, 2022). At the same time, the moral stereotyping of Greece may have even
played a role in the Greek government’s self-damaging decision to repudiate the 2015
bailout. Indeed, several experimental studies in economics have shown how emotional
arousal affects agents’behavior in bargaining games (Andrade and Ariely, 2009).
Overall, the “stickiness”of moral framing in the media may have also played a role in
shaping the collective memories of the crisis which, still to these days, differ across citi-
zens in debtors and creditors’countries (Arnemann et al., 2021), thus to some extent off-
setting the homogenizing effects of the Euro currency as a symbolic identifier of
European identity (Negri et al., 2021; Nones, 2024).
To this day, though, we lack a rigorous large-sample investigation of whether, and to
what extent, such moral narrative accompanied the European Sovereign Debt crisis.
While I do not empirically test the larger questions concerning the effects of moral
framing on attitudes and behavior, the empirical results of this article provide a solid
first step to tackle these questions in future research. Overall, the article contributes to
our understanding of the media-finance nexus on matters of international credit-debt rela-
tions. Theoretically, I provide a framework to understand under which conditions credit-
debt relations may be framed in moral terms. Methodologically, I rely on a dictionary-
based approach inspired by extensive research in social psychology to validate a reliable
measure of moral content in economic news coverage. To the best of my knowledge, this
is the first large-N quantitative investigation of the relationship between moral language
and the Greek sovereign debt crisis. After validating my measure of moral content in
written texts, I demonstrate the extent to which, during the financial crisis, Greece has
been described in negative moral terms. The empirics show that, not only was the
292 European Union Politics 25(2)
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