Going transnational? Candidates’ transnational linkages on Twitter during the 2019 European Parliament elections

Abstract

How transnational are European Parliament (EP) campaigns? Building on research on the European public sphere and the politicisation of the EU, this study investigates to what extent the 2019 EP campaign was transnational and which factors were associated with ‘going transnational’. It conceptualises Twitter linkages of EP candidates as constitutive elements of a transnational campaign arena distinguishing interactions with EP candidates from other countries (horizontal transnationalisation) and interactions with the supranational European party families and lead candidates (vertical transnationalisation). The analysis of tweets sent by EP candidates from all 28 member states reveals that most linkages remain national. Despite this evidence for the second-order logic, there are still relevant variations contingent on EU positions of parties, the adoption of the Spitzenkandidaten system and socialisation in the EP. The findings have implications for debates on the European public sphere and institutional reform proposals such as transnational party lists that might mitigate the EU’s democratic deficit.

Keywords:

• Transnationalisation
• politicisation
• European Union
• Spitzenkandidaten
• Twitter

Acknowledgements

We thank Swen Hutter, the anonymous reviewers, and participants at the 2019 ECPR General Conference and at the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies Workshop on the European Elections for their valuable comments. Caterina Froio thanks Cyril Benoît for helpful suggestions on related literature. Finally, we are grateful to colleagues across Europe, in particular Michaela Maier, for their help in translating the EU-related keywords and thank Céline Widera for excellent research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We acknowledge that the arena can be expanded by including political actors who are primarily oriented towards the national political system (such as heads of government or national parties), regular citizens or media actors who are also engaging with political actors on Twitter.

2 Koopmans and Erbe also identify a supranational dimension related to episodes of public attention devoted to supranational events across EU countries that, however, are not necessarily transnationally linked.

3 Spitzenkandidaten stand somewhere in between the vertical and the horizontal dimension as they are hybrid actors situated in the national and supranational campaign arenas. Still, given their role as spearheads for the campaigns of TNPs, we consider them as supranational actors. The empirical findings of the article are robust to a more restrictive operationalisation (see Results section).

4 Except for deleted tweets, which would have to be removed from data sets anyway according to Twitter’s terms and conditions.

5 In some cases, parties that formed electoral coalitions for the EP elections (e.g. Podemos and Izquierda Unida in Spain), belonged to different TNPs. We assigned these candidates to the TNPs and the CHES party code of the biggest coalition partner, in the above example, to Podemos.

6 Eighty-one percent of all tweets of candidates without a CHES ID were sent by just five parties that were founded only recently and not included in the latest CHES data collection: +Europa, Brexit Party, Change UK, Spring (Poland) and VOX. The rest of the non-covered tweets were sent by independent candidates and smaller parties not covered by CHES.

7 National election results for newly founded parties (e.g. Brexit Party) were coded as 0.

8 There is considerable heterogeneity in the organisation of party lists across European countries, as most countries have nation-wide party lists, whereas some countries such as Italy have regional lists.

9 The uncertainty about the electoral outcome per country is taken into account by calculating the standard deviation between the predictions and the actual seats won for each party. In cases where there were subnational party lists (the CDU/CSU in Germany, Italy, Poland and the UK), we calculated the electoral viability per candidate based on the share of national EP seats allocated to her/his district. In Finland and Ireland, where there were no ranked party lists, all candidates were categorised as ‘doubtful’.

10 We only used original tweets, i.e. removed retweets for this analysis. The keyword list contains translations for strings such as ‘ep’, ‘mep’, ‘ecb’, ‘frontex’ and the generic string ‘europ*’. We removed stop words specific for each language and Twitter handles so that an account name such as @europeangreens does not inflate the measure.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the VolkswagenStiftung under Grant [94758].

Notes on contributors

Sebastian Stier

Sebastian Stier is a Senior Researcher at the Department Computational Social Science, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne. His research focuses on political communication, comparative politics, populism and the use of digital trace data and computational methods in the social sciences. [[email protected]]

Caterina Froio

Caterina Froio is Assistant Professor in Political Science at Sciences Po (CEE). Her research interests are broadly in European politics, with a special emphasis on political parties, e-politics, right-wing extremism, radicalism and populism. Since 2016 she is joint convenor of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Standing Group on Extremism & Democracy. [[email protected]]

Wolf J. Schünemann

Wolf J. Schünemann is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, Hildesheim University. His research focuses on European politics, digital governance and communication, discourse research including computational methods. [[email protected]]