Blake Ewing | Hertford College, University of Oxford
Félix Krawatzek | Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS)
Studies of institutional change identify critical junctures from the position of hindsight. But this perspective
prioritises antecedent factors that downplay the role of agency around moments of potential change. This article looks at changes
in the ways in which agents use temporal language to identify events or periods as moments of (possible) juncture. It combines
quantitative and qualitative methods of text analysis, drawing on a corpus of British parliamentary speeches from 1811–2019. The
article first analyses changes in the strategic use of the term crisis over time, paying particular attention to significant
shifts in its politicisation and temporalisation. It then identifies three distinct components to the contestation of crises: over
their identification, evaluation and proposed prescriptions. We suggest that studies of critical juncture ought to focus more on
the use of temporal language around possible junctures to better understand the political dynamics at moments of heightened
uncertainty.
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Krawatzek, Félix & Friedemann Pestel
2024. The Political Force of Memory: The Making and Unmaking of Brexit as an Event. Comparative Studies in Society and History 66:1 ► pp. 4 ff.
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