The public sphere and debates about europe in Britain

Abstract

This article undertakes an analysis of British public debates on European integration by recourse to an original data set on political claims-making. The public sphere is conceptualized as a space where citizens interact through their acts of public communication. Such public communications are an important source of the Europe-building process, because they potentially provide public inputs to the elite-led processes of European political institutional integration. Our empirical findings show that British public debates are internalized within the nation-state rather than creating links to supra- or transnational European polities. In addition, we find relatively low levels of civil society engagement compared to that of political elites, and a high level of political competition between the two major political parties, Labour and Conservative. Overall, we argue that elite ambivalence to Britain's position within the European Union has created this climate of uncertainty and political competition over Europe.

Notes

This British study draws on insights from a cross-national comparative project, Europub.com, funded by an award within the EU's Framework Five Programme (award HPSE-CT2000-00046). So far, this project is still in its developmental stages of analysis, especially with regard to the cross-national comparison. Texts produced within this collaborative endeavour include Koopmans and Statham (2001), Koopmans and Pfetsch (2003) and Statham and Guiraudon (2004). For more information, visit http://europub.wz-berlin.de. The authors wish to acknowledge the intellectual input of Julie Firmstone at EurPolCom, Leeds, for the British project.

For more detail, see Koopmans et al. (forthcoming 2005) and Koopmans and Statham (1999b).

Data were coded from Lexis-Nexis versions of the newspapers by trained coding assistants using a standardized codebook. All articles in the home news section were checked for relevant acts, i.e. the search was not limited to articles containing certain key words. For some variables (actors, addressees, aims, etc.) open category lists were used. This allowed us to retain considerable detail from the original reports. Copies of articles were stored to allow us to go back to original reports if information was needed that had not been captured by the categories included in the codebook. Conventional inter-coder reliability tests were undertaken for article selection and coding.

In total we selected a sample from 52 days for 1990 and 1995, and 104 days for 2000, 2001 and 2002. Thus, the opportunities for claims were over-represented for the more recent years of our data set 2000, 2001 and 2002, compared to 1990 and 1995, by a ratio of 2:1. Note that we have not adjusted the tables to account for this bias, but this should nonetheless be borne in mind when reading them. We decided to include claims with a European scope from six policy fields, so that our sample did not focus simply on issues in the narrower field of European integration and institutional change.

For an example of an alternative strategy, see Risse and Van de Steeg (2003), whose case study of the Haider affair attempts to make general statements about Europeanization on the basis of a contingent and policy-specific event.

The comparison with France draws in part from a previous preliminary collaboration (Statham & Guiraudon, 2004).

The French data are available only for three years 1990, 1995, and 2000, but analysis (Statham & Guiraudon, 2004) shows that there are no significant differences in the British distributions for five compared to three years. In Table 1 we include only cases where there was both a claims-maker and an addressee, as this constitutes an actor relationship. For this table, where claims-making acts did not have an addressee, these cases were excluded.

The sample in Table 2 includes cases of claims-making acts where no addressee was specified.

For a more detailed analysis of the campaign group sector in the case of mobilization on the euro currency, see Gray (2003).

Other Eurosceptics were: New Europe, Labour Common Market Safeguards Campaign, the European Foundation, the European Research Group, the Conservative European Reform Group, the Bruges Group, the Metric Martyrs, and Subjects Against the Nice Treaty (Sanity). Other pro-European organizations: Business in Europe, the Action Centre for Europe, Positive Europe Group, and the Conservative Group for Europe.

Not all acts of claims-making contain frames. Often actors make an argument, claim or demand without elaborating explicitly the basis (reasoning devices, symbolic packages) for such a claim. Table 4 includes only those cases where there was sufficient information to code a frame used to convey a claim about European integration. For a similar analytic approach on framing, see Gamson and Modigliani (1989).