Mining PIGS. A structural topic model analysis of Southern Europe based on the German newspaper Die Zeit (1946-2009)

Abstract

The onset of the Eurozone crisis popularized the PIGS acronym, contrasting Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain unfavorably with their Northern European neighbors. In order to investigate the historic formation of this country group heuristic, we apply a Structural Topic Model (STM) to all 2,443 articles published between 1946 and 2009 in the German newspaper Die Zeit that mention Spain. The estimated topics and their evolution over time confirm a strong association of Spain with other Southern European countries as an ongoing characteristic of the German medial discourse for more than sixty years. Moreover, the STM allows us to distinguish and characterize a cultural, a political, and an economic dimension of PIGS countries’ perception in this newspaper. We find that the initial PIGS heuristic shaped by socio-cultural attributes that mainly reflected the experiences of German tourists was only later supplemented with economic ascriptions.