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Abstract
This article examines which parties included European issues in their 2014 European Parliament campaigns, and what influenced whether they did so, based on innovative data from the content analysis of 9,100 press releases in seven countries. Overall, established and especially governing parties no longer shied away from EU issues, referring to them as often as challenger parties did. The likelihood of EU issues in campaigns derives from a combination of predictors from the selective emphasis and co-orientation approaches. In general, parties with high internal dissent on EU integration avoid European issues, and weak leaders will only dare talk about the EU if internal dissent is low. However, between-party-type comparisons indicate that successful leaderships of governing parties facing strong internal divisions are even less likely to put EU issues on the agenda. With respect to the co-orientation model, parties’ EU focus seems to be mainly determined by the communication of (other) opposition parties.
Acknowledgements
Authorship of the first three authors is alphabetical to reflect their equal contribution. We would like to thank Jürgen Maier, Evelyn Bytzek and Sylvia Kritzinger for their comments on the data analysis as well as Eva Antl-Wittenberg and the team of Claes de Vreese at ASCOR for their help with the data collection. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.
Notes
1 Countries were selected in order to represent different degrees of citizens’ Euroscepticism (Eurobarometer and election results), Euroscepticism on the party level, previous government participation of Eurosceptic parties as well as parties’ internal cohesion regarding EU integration.
2 For Germany and the United Kingdom, we collected the press releases from party archives and party homepages. For Austria, all press releases were available from the Originaltext-Service GmbH (OTS). We chose national instead of European parties as European elections and campaigns take part mainly in the national arena.
3 The (English-language) search string contained the following keywords and word components: Europ*, europ*, EU, EP, EC, ECB, EIB, ESM, EFSF, EFSM, ECJ, EEAS, EESC, EIF, EDPS, EMU, Troika, troika, Frontex, FRONTEX.
4 An overview of the classification of parties is provided in the Web appendix.
5 Research has shown that parties’ strategic communication seeks to influence the media agenda but also takes into account issue salience in the national media under certain conditions (e.g. Thesen Citation2013; Van Aelst and Walgrave, Citation2011; Vesa et al. Citation2015; Vliegenthart and Montes Citation2014). In the context of this article, we follow the argument of Van der Pas (Citation2014: 43–44) who claims that ‘political actors have a choice whether to react or not to what the media are covering, and often consider this carefully’. As a result, EU salience in the national media coverage seems to be a relevant control variable.
6 The effects of the interaction terms are the same when included one by one.
7 The interaction term is not significant for model 2 with the EU issues mentioned at least twice (cat. 1, see Web appendix).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Beatrice Eugster
Beatrice Eugster is a senior researcher in Political Communication at the University of Bern. Her research interests include the politizication of European integration, negativity in the media and media representation of Muslims and Islam. Her work has appeared in International Journal of Press/Politics, European Union Politics and the European Journal of Communication Research.
Carlos Jalali
Carlos Jalali is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Aveiro. His research focuses on party systems, political parties and political institutions in Portugal and has been published in Party Politics, Public Policy and Administration, and South European Society and Politics, among others.
Michaela Maier
Michaela Maier is Professor for Communication Psychology at the University of Koblenz-Landau. In her research she focuses on political communication with a specific interest in campaign communication as well as on science communication. She has published in Communication Research, International Journal of Press/Politics, European Union Politics, Journal of European Public Policy, and Public Understanding of Science.
Severin Bathelt
Severin Jansen is a staff member at the Eberhard Karls University of Tüebingen. In his research, he focuses on political communication, marketing and voter relations.
Melanie Leidecker-Sandmann
Melanie Leidecker-Sandmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Department of Science Communication. Her research focuses on political communication, journalism studies and science communication.
Silke Adam
Silke Adam is Professor of Political Communication at the University of Berne. Her research interests include digitalization of political communication, strategic political communication, interplay of communication channels, media usage and effects. She has published in New Media & Society, International Journal of Press/Politics, European Union Politics, Journal of European Public Policy, among others.
Ralph Negrine
Ralph Negrine is Emeritus Professor of Political Communication at the University of Sheffield. He has researched and written extensively on the relationship between politics and communication, especially in Britain.
Nicolas Demertzis
Nicolas Demertzis is Professor of Political Sociology and Communication at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His recent research focuses on political communication and the political sociology of emotions.