Comparative Cognitive Mapping Guidelines

Transcrisis aims to develop a solid understanding of the role of leaders in managing transboundary crises, and the requirements for ensuring an effective and legitimate crisis response. In addition to material and institutional requirements, leaders’ policy ideas, peoples’ preferences and public discourses play an important role in many of the seven phases of crisis management identified in this project, like for instance in the phase of detection, coordination, and especially meaning making and communication. Establishing the precise nature and effects of these ‘soft’ but influential factors in crisis management is notoriously difficult, for ideas, preferences and discourses are intangible phenomenon that cannot be observed directly (Fiske & Taylor 1991; Risse 1994). To be able to study these phenomenon and their effects on the effectiveness and legitimacy of crisis management, Transcrisis will make use of a method that was specifically designed to analyse such ideational factors: the method of Comparative Cognitive Mapping (CCM). CCM is a well-developed technique that has been successfully applied in many fields of study (Axelrod, 1976; Bougon, Weick & Binkhorst 1977; Curseu, Schalk & Schruijer 2010; Princen & Van Esch forthcoming; Van Esch 2012; 2014; Young & Schafer 1998). It may provide insight in the ideas and preferences of the various leaders involved in transboundary crisis management, but has also been used to study discourses and the way citizens think about the causes of, and potential solutions to crises. Through its various modes of analysis, CCM also enables a comparison between actors’ and the evolution of ideas and discourses over time. As such, CCM provides an useful technique to apply in the various case-studies within the Transcrisis project and can be combined with techniques that provide insight in the material and institutional requirements for effective and legitimate crisis management. This guideline will provide an overview of the CCM technique as well as some basic instructions of how to apply the method. In addition, it will offer the reader several illustrations of the relevance of CCM. A more detailed coding manual will be developed as part of Work Package 3 of the project