Framing the Energy Crisis in Czechia

Abstract

This paper presents the concept of framing and introduces one of the methods used to study it. It is illustrated through the main aspects of political communication in Czechia regarding the “energy crisis” in the immediate aftermath of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine (2022) on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). Observed aspects of political communication are focused on four main framing functions as Entman described them: how politicians defined the problem; how they described the cause of the problem; what their moral standpoint was; and what their proposed solution was. The author employed a mixed content analysis with multicoding on a corpus of 98 posts by seven Czech politicians. During the first peak of the energy crisis, the governing coalition maintained a unified framing of the situation, whereas the two opposition leaders framed it neither in line with the coalition nor consistently with one another. Coalition politicians primarily focused their communication on proposing solutions aimed at ending the energy crisis, or at least mitigating its economic effects on the population of Czechia. Opposition politicians most frequently expressed their moral standpoint.