European Union Enlargement and British Public Opinion: The Agenda-Setting Power of the Press

Abstract

While the British government was strongly in favour of the 2004 European Union (EU) enlargement, British public opinion was predominantly against it. Being conducted under the theoretical umbrella of agenda-setting research, this article scrutinizes the print media coverage of EU enlargement between 2002 and 2004 to account for the gap between public opinion and official policy. It combines quantitative content analysis of coverage in a number of leading British newspapers with Eurobarometer public opinion data. After revealing strong evidence for the transfer of issue salience from media to public, it examines the role of the press in shaping public attitudes toward enlargement. The results not only provide an improved understanding of media effects in the British context but also have profound implications for the ‘democratic deficit’ debate in the EU.

Key Words:

• Agenda setting
• British public opinion
• democratic deficit
• European Union enlargement

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Maxwell E. McCombs, Terri E. Givens, Tse-Min Lin, Wayne Selcher, and two anonymous peer reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

The term ‘media coverage’ in this article refers to both the level and attributes of newspaper coverage of the topic of EU enlargement.

Another reason for focusing only on newspapers is the lack of a systematic collection of TV news coverage on EU enlargement during the time frame of this study.

The Sun and The Daily Mirror, two of the most popular tabloid newspapers in the UK market, could not be included in the content analysis, due to unavailability of the British editions of these tabloids in the Lexis-Nexis database during the time frame of this study. The Telegraph, another high circulation newspaper, was not included in the analysis in order to not to tilt the balance of the newspapers further to the right.

It is important to note that even though the time-lagged correlation helps determine whether public opinion followed the press coverage, it is does not test causation.

Only the ‘rather agree’ answers were included in the analysis, in order to ensure correspondence between the tone of the public opinion on a particular consequence of enlargement and the tone of the newspaper coverage of these consequences.

These final subcategories were selected from a range of options in Flash Eurobarometer Survey Series on Enlargement based on the relevance of each sub-category to enlargement's consequences.

Following the agenda-setting theory's assumptions, the primary theme variables were included in the second-level agenda-setting analysis, since they represent the 2004 enlargement's aspects emphasized most heavily by the newspaper coverage. If an article made equal numbers of references to all consequences, the consequence emphasized in the headline or the lead paragraph was coded as the primary theme of the article.

Initially, the tone of the press coverage of enlargement was included in the codebook. However, due to low levels of intercoder reliability measures, this was eliminated during the pre-tests. Therefore, the tone of the press coverage was analysed only qualitatively. For instance, if an article referred to negative impacts of enlargement, such as an expected increase in unemployment, immigration, organized crime, etc., the tone was interpreted as negative.

Due to unavailability of public opinion data immediately before the Enlargement Day, 1 May 2004, analysis could not be extended to this time period. The British coverage of EU enlargement reached its peak in April 2004. Even then, only a total of 52 newspaper articles were published monthly. Given that, it is not surprising that the relationship between the press and public framings is not statistically significant.