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Transcrisis aims to develop a solid understanding of the role of leaders in managing transboundary crises and the requirements for ensuring an effective and legitimate crisis response. One of the seven crisis-management tasks that leaders need to perform is meaning-making. Meaning-making refers to the necessity to formulate a key message that offers an explanation of the threat, actionable advice, and a sense that leaders are in control of the situation (Boin, Cadar & Donnelley, 2016). Adequate meaning making is key to dealing with a crisis in an effective and legitimate fashion. This is especially important during transboundary crises as cultural, national, legal boundaries make shared meaning making more difficult and less routine. The aim of meaning-making is twofold: first, to ensure that leaders 'get a firm grasp on what is going on', second for leaders to develop a clear idea of 'what might happen next' (Boin et al, 2005: 140). Sense making is a crucial task in any crisis situation because it helps central decision-makers clarify their underlying assumptions on how the world works, and contemplate the value of different solutions before decisions are actually made. In case of transnational crises, meaning making should in part also occur across boundaries so a mutual understanding of the situation amongst different stakeholders may develop, or differences in view are revealed. Although meaning making is often portrayed as one of the earlier phases in crisis management, in reiterated decision-making games associated with prolonged crisis situations, it should be a continuous process. Meaning making is a difficult task and even more complex in case of highly complex, transboundary crises like the Euro crisis. The threat, complexity and calls for urgent and decisive action that accompany such crises may tempt leaders to skip crucial parts of the meaning making effort and quickly jump to discussing possible solutions (Van Esch and Swinkels, 2016). Adding to these difficulties is the fact that leaders ...

Transcrisis aims to develop a solid understanding of the role of leaders in managing transboundary crises and the requirements for ensuring an effective and legitimate crisis response. One of the seven crisis-management tasks that leaders need to perform is meaning-making. Meaning-making refers to the necessity to formulate a key message that offers an explanation of the threat, actionable advice, and a sense that leaders are in control of the situation (Boin, Cadar & Donnelley, 2016). Adequate meaning making is key to dealing with a crisis in an effective and legitimate fashion. This is especially important during transboundary crises as cultural, national, legal boundaries make shared meaning making more difficult and less routine. In its totality, Deliverable 3.2 will study meaning-making in nine member states at three different levels, using the method of cognitive mapping: the level of political and financial leaders, meaning making in the public discourse (Op-ed media sources) and meaning making by citizens (Survey). In the present report (D3.2a), we explore how political and financial leaders of nine European Union member states have made meaning of the Euro-crisis. The current three reports that will make up this deliverable will only contain quantitative analyses, the final report of WP3 will offer more in-depth and comparative analysis of the three level of meaning-making.

Transcrisis aims to develop a solid understanding of the role of leaders in managing transboundary crises and the requirements for ensuring an effective and legitimate crisis response. In addition to material and institutional requirements, leaders' policy ideas, peoples' preferences and public discourses play an important role in this. Establishing the precise nature and effects of these 'soft' but influential factors in crisis management is notoriously difficult, for ideas, preferences and discourses are intangible phenomenon that cannot be observed directly (Fiske & Taylor 1991; Risse-Kappen 1994). To be able to study these phenomenon and their effects on the effectiveness and legitimacy of crisis management, Transcrisis will make use of a method that was specifically designed to analyse such ideational factors: the method of Comparative Cognitive Mapping (CCM; Axelrod 1976; Bougon, Weick & Binkhorst 1977; Curseu, Schalk & Schruijer 2010; Princen & Van Esch forthcoming; Van Esch 2012; 2014; Young & Schafer 1998). This coding manual provides a practical methodological guideline that explains how to use the technique of CCM to uncover ideas and discourses. The manual offers valuable insights for other scholars resulting from our years of experience in using the technique. However, the practices described in the manual will be inspired by the research question of central to Work package 3 (WP3) of the TRANSCRISIS project in particular, and serve as a guide for studying the role and changes in the ideas and discourses that pertain to the management of the Euro crisis.