Crisis frames in the public discourse of the Municipality of Budapest after the COVID-19 pandemic

This paper aims to investigate the Municipality of Budapest as a discursive actor; as an agenda-setter, politics-interpreter, and policy problem-definer. The focus of the research is to explore how the city government has used the term crisis to frame issues, political positions, and policy proposals, and to influence the thematic directions in the public discourse after the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, the analysis collects the policy-relevant collocations of the crisis frame used by the municipal politicians of Budapest, or rather lists the terms in which the crisis frame activated. In addition, the study searches the main characteristics of the most and least frequently used collocations with regard to their tone, context and the values attached to them. Besides all that, the text also discusses the role of the crisis frame in the definition of (certain) public policy problems and the political strategies that have been associated with the use of the term.