Agents of Europeanization: Think Tanks Discussing the Refugee Crisis in the Czech Republic.

This article belongs to the special cluster, "Think Tanks in Central and Eastern Europe", guest-edited by Katarzyna Jezierska and Serena Giusti. What is the role of think tanks in Europeanization of national public spheres? To address this question, our paper explores the performance of think tanks in the immigration debate in the Czech Republic. Employing political claims analysis (PCA) and treating think tanks as boundary organizations active in multiple fields, we compare the levels of Europeanization of political claims made by think tanks with other actors. Our data set includes 2,374 political claims made on broadcast public TV in the period from April 2015 to March 2016. According to our quantitative data, Czech think tanks chose the discursive strategy of Europeanization more often than any other actor represented. Thus, think tanks have the potential to support Europeanization of national public spheres. However, their representation in media coverage is relatively low. Our results also demonstrate that think tanks should be treated as sui generis organizations since their strategy in the public sphere deviates from that of other civil society organizations. Think tanks Europeanized their claims-making, but others largely stayed on the national level while discussing the refugee crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]