The discursive legitimation strategies of the president of the commission: a qualitative content analysis of the State of the Union Addresses (SOTEU)

ABSTRACT

In this work, we investigate the way in which the two latest Presidents of the Commission have tackled the question of the legitimacy of the EU in the delivery of the State of the Union Addresses (SOTEU). Our analysis, based on a qualitative content analysis of the SOTEU speeches, identifies a marked difference in the discursive legitimation strategies employed by the two Presidents and in the conception of the legitimacy of the EU that they promote. In Barroso’s speeches, the legitimazing principle recalls the classical functionalist interpretation of the ‘rationality’ of the EU decisions mainly in terms of economic outputs, whilst the underlying conception of legitimacy that shapes Juncker’s speeches recalls an input-based understanding of legitimacy as democracy and popular sovereignty. By way of conclusion, we argue that the introduction of the Spitzencandidaten system has been instrumental in providing the two Presidents with a different discursive opportunity structure.

KEYWORDS:

• Content analysis
• President of the Commission
• discursive legitimation
• EU State of the Union address
• SOTEU
• EU legitimacy

Acknowledgments

This article was written as part of the project “REScEU - Reconciling Economic and Social Europe”, funded by the European Research Council (advanced grant no. 340534) and led by Maurizio Ferrera, whom we thank for his support on all stages of this work. We are also grateful to all the participants to the REScEU Team Meetings in Milan, to Thomas Christiansen, Editor of this journal, for his support to our work, and to three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. “Each year in the first part-session of September, a State of the Union debate will be held in which the President of the Commission shall deliver an address, taking stock of the current year and looking ahead to priorities for the following years. To that end, the President of the Commission will in parallel set out in writing to Parliament the main elements guiding the preparation of the Commission Work Programme for the following year”. Framework Agreement on relations between the European Parliament and the European Commission (2010, 16, ANNEX IV, 5).

2. While all speeches are structured as a series of items for discussion that constitute the agenda for the year to come, the SOTEU 2015 stands out as exceptional with a single topic – the refugee crisis – taking up almost half of it.

3. Speech transcripts were coded with NVivo 10. The work of the two independent coders showed a good degree of inter-coder reliability, with a Kappa coefficient ranging from 0.76 to 0.94 for the various symbols categories.

4. Our approach is thus similar to the methodology of the Manifesto Project (Werner, Lacewell, and Volkens 2011). The main difference lies in the definition of the coding unit. Unlike the Manifesto Project, we did not focus exclusively on argumentative units defined as quasi-sentences: in our methodology, a single word, intentionally selected by the speaker to carry evaluative content, constitutes a symbol just as much as a complex sentence.

5. The relative frequency of a category is obtained in relation to the entire symbolic content of the speech. Symbols that do not pertain to any of the categories relevant to our investigation are included in the category ‘Other’.

6. When a symbol referring to a ‘value’ is intended as a ‘goal’ it is registered twice, once in the category ‘values’ and once in the category ‘goals’.

7. Note that symbols denoting the political community as a ‘recipient’ of the EU decisions do not constitute a basis for legitimacy and accordingly are not registered in the category sources of legitimacy.

8. The higher number of symbols identified in Juncker’s 2015 speech is also due to its greater length (around 10,000 words against an average length of 5,000 words of all other speeches).

9. Note that the sub-category ‘community as a source’ is included within the category ‘sources of legitimacy’.

Additional information

Funding

This paper has been written in the context of the RESCEU Project (Reconciling economic and social Europe, www.resceu.eu), funded by the European Research Council (Advanced Grant no. 340534).