From streets to parliament: understanding the mechanisms of protest impact on the policy-making process in the European Parliament’s TTIP debate

ABSTRACT

Following years of intense protest, the negotiations for the TTIP agreement were declared ‘dead in the water’ by the end of 2016. Although there has been ample scholarly attention on how Civil Society Organisations were able to politicise the issue, there is little evidence on how this politicisation ultimately impacted the policy-making process for the trade agreement. Building on an analysis of over 500 parliamentary questions in conjunction with in-depth interviews with eight MEPs from five different political groups, I show that the anti-TTIP campaigns reframed the problem definition of the agreement which led to a lasting shift of its policy image and changed the stance of some policymakers. Further, the anti-TTIP protests contributed to the salience of TTIP among the public and subsequently changed policymakers’ perceptions of the attitudes of the public towards the proposed agreement. Finally, the protests created partisan as well as inter-institutional conflict on the issue.

KEYWORDS:

• European Parliament
• politicisation
• protest
• policy-making
• responsiveness

Introduction

In the past two decades, European integration generally as well as EU policies in particular have become increasingly politicised, not just among elites but among the wider European public. One way this politicisation has manifested is in the form of street-level protest on European issues, which has been further exacerbated by various European crises in recent years. A growing body of literature has provided ample empirical evidence of the extent of politicisation (Grande and Hutter 2016; Green-Pedersen 2012; Kriesi 2007) and by now, there seems to be wide scholarly agreement on its irreversibility (Hoeglinger 2016; Hooghe and Marks 2009).

However, the potential consequences of the politicisation of Europe on policy-making have received less attention. Some scholars have theorised that a more politicised Europe will lead to constraints for European policy-making and thus point to the negative consequences of politicisation (Hooghe and Marks 2009). Other scholars suggest that politicisation could have a reinvigorating effect for politics and the state of democracy in Europe, highlighting the inherently positive aspects of political conflict and proposing that politicisation can ultimately lead to more responsiveness (Zürn 2014). Further, it has also been suggested that the impact of the politicisation of Europe is neither positive nor negative but simply very limited (Schimmelfennig 2012). However, empirical evidence for any of these claims is still largely lacking.

Some scholars of EU public policy have more recently tackled the question of the consequences of politicisation by turning to the responsiveness of EU institutions to public opinion (Bruycker and Iskander 2020; de Wilde and Rauh 2019; Wratil 2018), while others have integrated protest as a public opinion signal and expression of politicisation on the mass level (Bernardi, Bischof, and Wouters 2020; Bouza and Oleart 2018). In line with those latter authors, this study proposes a view of protest as a particularly important expression of politicisation for a number of reasons. Protest quite literally embodies the idea of an actor expansion as large numbers of people become actors by joining the protest and thus the debate. It further signals high salience of an issue, especially if the protests are reported about in news and media outlets. Finally, if there are not only protests but also counter-protests, protest offers a clear indication of a high polarisation on the issue. But if Europeans protest, do EU policymakers listen?

This study focuses on the demonstrations against a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) as a highly instructive case for examining whether and how protest as a form of mass politicisation can influence policy-making processes in the European Union. Specifically, this contribution is interested in the impact of the anti-TTIP protests on the debate within the European Parliament (EP) during the negotiation process for the trade agreement. While the importance of multi-level trade politics in the case of TTIP is undisputed (see Crespy and Rone 2022; Siles-Brügge and Strange 2020) and even though the EP did not ultimately freeze the negotiations for the trade agreement itself, it is a relevant case nonetheless. Not only can the EP be seen to be one of the main targets of protest since the Lisbon Treaty came into effect in 2009, with powerful veto instruments at its disposal, as was demonstrated when it rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in 2012 (Crespy and Parks 2017). De Ville and Gheyle (2023) also show that the role of the EP during the TTIP negotiations was far from inconsequential, arguing that ‘ [t]he EP’s 2015 resolution on TTIP has had precedential effect and has in that way affected future trade negotiations and agreements’ (de Ville and Gheyle 2023, 18). Further, while this focus on the impact of anti-TTIP protests on MEPs can illuminate one facet of the consequences of politicisation on the TTIP negotiations specifically, this is also a useful case to further our understanding of the link between protest and policy-making in the EP more generally.

Building on an analysis of over 500 parliamentary questions in conjunction with in-depth interviews with eight MEPs from five different political groups, I find that the anti-TTIP protests impacted the debate around TTIP within the EP both through pressure from public opinion and by gaining political allies within the EP. First, the anti-TTIP protests fundamentally reframed the problem definition of the TTIP agreement, which led to a lasting shift of the policy image that transferred into parliamentary debates. This informed some MEPs about aspects of the agreement they had not been aware of, which as a consequence influenced their positioning on the issue. Second, the protests raised the public salience of the issue and subsequently changed policymakers’ perceptions of the attitudes of the wider public towards the proposed agreement. Finally, the protests created partisan as well as inter-institutional conflict on TTIP, which led some MEPs to become political allies of the anti-TTIP protesters in order to challenge the Commission over the way it had undertaken the negotiation process.

The contribution of this paper is both empirical and theoretical. It produces empirical evidence on the consequences of mass-level politicisation on policy-making processes in the EP by showing how the anti-TTIP protests impacted MEPs’ views of the trade agreement negotiations, establishing a link that so far had only been theorised. Theoretically, this study bridges EU public policy studies with social movement literature to offer a new framework to analyse protest impact in the context of policy-making in the EP, opening up exciting avenues of research in the face of recent, current and future protests in European streets. I proceed as follows: First, I sketch out existing views on the impact of anti-TTIP campaigns on the failure of the trade agreement negotiations. Second, I theorise the mechanisms through which protest can be seen to influence policy-making in the EP, developing a novel theoretical framework. The following two sections I present my data and methods and subsequently my empirical results. I conclude with a brief discussion and an outlook for further research.

The politicisation of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership

The focus of existing studies seeking to assess the impact of the anti-TTIP campaigns and protests has primarily been on explaining how these campaigns were able to politicise the issue to an extent that it became highly salient among the wider public. One common emphasis here is on how anti-TTIP movement organisations were able to frame the central issues that were negotiated between US and EU policymakers, as well as the way the agreement was negotiated. One of the most contested issues was the proposed Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, through which disputes between foreign investors and domestic governments are solved using arbitration fora (Titievskaia 2022). The ISDS issue was framed by anti-TTIP campaigns as a threat for EU public policy specifically, giving unfair advantage to aggressive American corporations, but also as a threat to European democracy more generally, putting private corporations above the rule of law (Garcia-Duran and Eliasson 2017; Siles-Brügge 2017). Similarly, the supposedly significantly lower health, food, social and environmental standards in the US were framed as a threatening race to the bottom by invoking images of chlorinated chicken, gene-manipulated produce and pasture livestock fed with antibiotics as growth-hormones (Bauer 2016; de Bièvre and Poletti 2017; Garcia-Duran and Eliasson 2017; Organ 2017). Another central issue that anti-TTIP campaigns successfully framed as a threat to European democracy was the alleged lack of transparency with which the agreement was negotiated. The commission reacted to the initial criticisms by publishing at least some of the negotiation documents. This led to even greater pushbacks against the agreement by CSOs and the public (Gheyle and de Ville 2017; Heldt 2020).

A second emphasis in the existing literature is on how the organisations behind the campaigns interacted with each other and other political actors to create a lasting politicisation of the issue. CSOs interacted with a large number of other players, including trade unions, media organisations and businesses (Gheyle and Rone 2022), and they were able to expand their network beyond the domestic context and ‘Europeanise’ their protest (Caiani and Graziano 2018).

Much less attention has been paid to how the high salience of the TTIP issue then impacted the ongoing negotiations and potentially contributed to their failure. Eliasson and Garcia-Duran Huet (2018) lay out in detail how the ongoing anti-TTIP protests influenced public opinion by showing how not only internet searches on TTIP generally but negatively framed internet searches specifically increased steadily throughout the protest waves, while public opinion surveys show that support for TTIP decreased within the same timeframe. They then go on to argue that this in turn influenced policymakers by putting pressure on them. While this is a plausible claim, it warrants closer attention. After all, an increase in public attention, and even public opinion supporting the issues raised by protest, may be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for protest to achieve political change. It appears to have been established that the anti-TTIP protests had an influence on public opinion on the issue. However, the link between protest and public opinion on the one hand, and policy change on the other hand, needs to be further scrutinised to be able to make a substantiated argument about whether and how the anti-TTIP protests ultimately impacted the part of the policy-making process that took place within the EP.

The conceptual approach taken in this study which centres around protest as a manifestation of politicisation advances current debates on the impact of politicisation in several ways. Firstly, protest is a ‘weapon of the weak’ (Wouters and Walgrave 2017, 362), and as Wouters and Walgrave further point out, whether and under which conditions protest is responded to by policymakers can tell us something about how inclusive a democracy is. Since a possible positive aspect of the increased politicisation of Europe has been theorised to lie in a reinvigorating effect for EU democracy, examining whether and how EU policymakers respond to protest can be seen as a litmus test for how this potential plays out in practice. Further, studying the impact of protest as a form of politicisation is also advantageous from a methodological point of view. Empirically, the politicisation of Europe has been characterised as following a punctuated, rather than a linear pattern (Kriesi 2016, 34). In other words, there seems to have been no constant, general increase in politicisation over the past decades, but a trend towards increased politicisation that consists in moments of heightened politicisation which then decreases again to some extent. Periods of protest similarly constitute moments of heightened conflict which are very much confined to a limited time and place. I contend that this makes protest as a form of mass politicisation the more suitable alternative to study instead of more general public opinion signals, which are vaguer and as such more difficult to connect to policymakers’ reactions.

Theorising the impact of protest on policy-making in the EU

How to assess the impact of protest on policy-making processes specifically, and political change in a broader sense, is a notoriously difficult question to answer and one that social movement scholars have grappled with for decades. In this section, I propose a new theoretical framework for explaining the impact of policy-making in the context of the EU by drawing on literature from the field of social movement studies.

In recent years, there has been a shift away from more static, opportunity structure-focused approaches towards more dynamic approaches that aim to explain the mechanisms of social movement success (Fishman and Everson 2016). The dynamic framework for analysing social movement impact in the EU that I propose in this contribution theorises explicitly the links between both social movement action and public opinion, as well as between social movement action and the policymakers that are ultimately shaping the policy-making process. By doing that, it seeks to enable the study of two different but complementary and even intertwined ways of indirect movement impact: social movements can impact policy-making processes by changing public opinion, which in turn puts pressure on policymakers and contributes to policy change (Stimson, Mackuen, and Erikson 1995) and by winning over allies in (some) policymakers, whose actions then contribute to policy change (Della Porta 1996). The two pathways are not mutually exclusive and social movements can achieve political change using both of these at the same time (Giugni and Passy 1998). Further, this framework acknowledges the possibility that some policymakers may be protester allies from the start. I suggest that there are three mechanisms through which protest can influence policymakers over either or both of the two complementary pathways: the reframing mechanism, the public salience mechanism, and the elite conflict mechanism. While I argue these are three distinct mechanisms that are at play, these are best viewed as dynamic, sometimes interdependent sequences that are intertwined and can reinforce each other. In what follows, I will briefly sketch out each of these three mechanisms that will then guide the analysis in the remainder of this study.

First, the reframing mechanism can be triggered by ‘shifting the policy image of the issue by modifying the underlying problem definition’ (Kolb 2007, 93). (Re-)framing in this context is understood as a discursive process in which actors attach (new) meaning to an issue which then guides individual or collective action (Snow et al. 1986). Specifically, Snow notes that this is a ‘process in which some events, issues, and beliefs or ideas are accented and highlighted in contrast to others, with the result that they become more salient in an array or hierarchy of group-relevant issues, perhaps coming to function as significant coordinating symbols or mechanisms’ (Snow 2004, 400). As Caiani has put it aptly, ‘discontent, resources, and political opportunities are not simply “out there” in the external world, but have to be cognitively perceived and constructed in order to become a basis for action’ (Caiani 2023, 196). By convincing enough people that a given issue concerns them and has an impact on their life, the reframing of an issue can turn issues that would have been considered technical and had a low salience into highly contested issues that have the potential to activate many people. I contend that this reframing of an issue may not only lead to a change in the preferences of the public, but it can also lead to a change in the preferences of policymakers themselves. Further, the reframing of issues through protest can also inform policymakers of aspects of the contested policy that they were not aware of before. When protesters manage to influence policymakers’ own perception of certain issues to an extent that they will change their actions in the policy-making process, protest can turn policymakers into political allies.

Secondly, by triggering the public salience mechanism, protest can alter the policy preferences of the public, i.e. the wider public becomes more aware of an issue or more polarised in their opinion on the issue. This, in turn, can ‘alter […] policymakers’ perceptions of public attitudes’ (Kolb 2007, 93). By convincing policymakers that the issue at hand is more salient among the wider public than they may have believed before, and as a consequence convince them of a need to act on that, protest can lead to policy change. While Kolb (2007) suggests that these are two separate mechanisms that can lead to political change on their own, I argue that the former is necessary but not sufficient without the latter. Only if policymakers perceive a higher public salience on an issue as such, and feel inclined to act on it, is there a possibility for policy change. For instance, MEPs may perceive the salience of an issue as high but have conflicting policy goals or office seeking goals which require them to act in line with their parties’ policy goals. In such instances, the high salience alone is insufficient to trigger an impact. Further, it is important to note that a perceived high salience may or may not reflect the actual salience of the issue among the broader public and beyond the protesters acting in the streets (Wouters and Walgrave 2017).

Finally, protest can lead to policy change by triggering the elite conflict mechanism. On the one hand, this can be partisan conflict, when protest makes formerly non-partisan issues subject to partisan conflict (Kolb 2007, 80). Following McAdam and Tarrow (2010), I contend that this protest-induced conflict or polarisation may not only occur between competing parties but even split parties internally. However, in the context of the EU, elite conflict also needs to be understood along inter-institutional lines. This is one of the dimensions that Marks and McAdam (1996) identify as a precondition that is favourable to positive movement impact in their political opportunity structure approach to understanding social movement influence in the EU. Since the early 2000s, the EP has gained substantial influence within the network of EU institutions (Scully 2006). Parks argues that “[i]n line with the logic, whereby institutions seek to reinforce and expand their power, the Parliament has been keen to carve out its position as an equal of the other European institutions by exercising its powers, including those newly acquired” (Parks 2015, 27). Further, the EP can be seen as maybe the most open EU institution when it comes to being responsive to protest. Della Porta and Parks argue that ‘[a]s a plural, elected assembly, the EP is a potential target for unconventional, grassroots-oriented strategies as its members are reasoned to be more likely to respond to citizens’ demands’ (Della Porta and Parks 2018, 88). This positioning of the EP vis-à-vis the Commission and other EU institutions suggests that MEPs are especially receptive to protests when the protest is also directed against the Commission. Whereas Kolb suggests that partisan conflict contributes to political change by influencing public opinion along partisan lines, I propose that inter-institutional conflict can lead to political change by turning some policymakers into allies of protesters, a dimension I argue is crucial for understanding the dynamics with which protest shapes policy-making processes in the EU context.

As Figure 1 shows, these mechanisms should be considered independently from each other, but it is imported to note that they can also trigger each other and occur in a dynamic cycle of reinforcement. For example, an issue could be reframed by a small group of protesters, which in turn raises the salience of the issue among more people who join the protests. In turn, the higher salience, translated into larger protest events, may amplify the frame used in the protests and make it a dominant frame in the discussions on the issue, both within and outside of the EP. Similarly, an issue that is successfully reframed by a group of activists could alert MEPs of aspects of the issue they had not been aware of before, and in turn create elite-conflict, either between the EP and other institutions, but also between political groups, when they realign themselves in response to the politicisation of said issue. The successful reframing of an issue could thus simultaneously trigger the public salience mechanism and the elite conflict mechanism, and they could coincide in a reinforcing way. Another imaginable pathway here would be a scenario in which protests raise the public salience of an issue to an extent that MEPs feel compelled to position themselves, which in turn leads to elite conflict when different political groups align themselves in competing ways. In sum, theoretically, any combination of these mechanisms in any temporal sequence might occur. The pertinent and crucial question then is how to operationalise this process to ensure that these mechanisms are traced and disentangled sufficiently to examine how each of them contributed to the impact of the protest events. In the following section, I will lay out in detail how the mechanisms are operationalised for this study.

Figure 1. Protest impact mechanisms and their possible pathways.

Data and methods

This paper is based on the triangulation of a quantitative as well as an in-depth qualitative content analysis of over 500 parliamentary questions issued in the EP between 2014 and 2016, and in-depth semi-structured interviews with MEPs. The interviews were conducted with eight German MEPs from the biggest European party families who were in office during the legislation period 2014–2019 (see Table A1). All 96 German MEPs from that legislation period were invited for an interview, with a positive response rate of 8,33%. German MEPs were chosen for the interviews because the anti-TTIP protests were strongest in terms of the event and participant numbers in Germany. Further, being the largest democracy in the EU and at the same time the arguably least likely for strong mobilisation against an agreement that some scholars have argued would have been economically more beneficial for parts of its economy than for many other member states (Gheyle and Rone 2022), makes Germany an especially instructive case.

Two of the interviewees were members of the Party of European Socialists group (S&D), two MEPs were members of the European People’s Party group (EPP), two MEPs were members of the Greens/The European Free Alliance group (Greens/EFA), one was a member of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) group, and one was a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group. The interviewees were asked to describe the protests and the impression these made on them, as well as whether and how this impression changed over the course of the negotiations. They were further asked to describe how the other political groups in the EP viewed the protests, whether they personally had reacted to the protests in any form, and what the main reasons for the failure of the negotiations were in their opinion. Finally, each interviewee was asked to describe in which ways each EU institution can be regarded open or closed towards mass protest. All interviews were transcribed fully and analysed using NVivo12. The interviews were conducted in spring and early summer 2022, and thus rely on the recollection of the interviewees several years after the protests took place. Further, it has to be assumed that what the respondents shared has a connection to ongoing beliefs they hold (Smith 1995). To account for this, the interview data is triangulated with other primary and secondary sources, and the question of a connection between the way interviewees perceived the protests and their own ideological predispositions is extensively reflected on in the discussion of the findings.

In addition to the in-depth interviews, 502 parliamentary questions referring to TTIP were analysed. Parliamentary questions are a way for parties or political groups to highlight their priorities, even if they may not have a direct impact on policy-making but rather a symbolic function (Walgrave and van Aelst 2006). The parliamentary questions, which were retrieved from the European Parliament database (europarl.europa.eu), were coded in NVivo12 using Directed Content Analysis. Coding categories were determined before, and subcategories added successively (see Table 1). The questions were then analysed using keyword search, as well as through a manual overall assessment. Some parliamentary questions fit in several categories and were thus coded into several categories.

Table 1. Parliamentary question coding categories, subcategories and keywords.

Category	Subcategory	Keywords
Procedural issues	Transparency	transparency, transparent, disclosure, secrecy, open
	Ratification process	Ratification, ratify, mixed agreement
Substantive issues	Health and food standards	Antibiotics, growth promoters, chlorine, peroxyacetic acid, growth hormones, food safety, chemicals, pesticides, health, healthcare, drugs
	Environment and agriculture	Environment, environmental, resources, sustainability, unsustainable, emissions, glyphosate, consumers
	Social and labour standards	Labour, social, jobs, public, services, employment, working conditions, security
	Public and health services	Public services, services of public interest, public water services, public energy services, health insurance, health services, public health
	Energy	Energy, electricity, gas, renewable, efficiency
	Tax evasion	Tax, taxation, multinational corporation, tax avoidance, taxpayers, fiscal
	ISDS	ISDS, investor-to-state dispute settlement, investor-state dispute settlement arbitration
Public opinion	Public opinion	Citizens, public opinion, opinion poll, publicity, concerns, public debate
	Protest	Protest, mobilising, mobilisation, citizens’ initiative, petition
Impact on existing legislation		Legislation, international law, international agreements, third countries

To operationalise the reframing mechanism, I first reconstruct which frames were used during the protest events over the course of time. Then, I reconstruct the parliamentary debate thoroughly, again with a careful view to its timeline. In a third step, the two reconstructions are mapped on to each other. Did a frame originate in the protest events, and travel into parliamentary debates in a defined timeframe after the protest events took place? Did competing frames exist in the parliamentary debate, but a frame utilised in the protest sequence became a dominant frame after the protests took place?

To operationalise the public salience mechanism, I first determine how salient the protest issue was among the public before and after the protests by drawing on public opinion surveys as well as alternative measures of public salience, such as the number of internet searches. However, the more important step for operationalising this mechanism is the second one, in which I establish whether policymakers perceived the salience of an issue to be higher after the protests than before the protests. This is primarily done by using interview data, i.e. by asking policymakers directly about their perception of public salience of an issue. Further, parliamentary debates and political statements are analysed to determine whether and to what extent MEPs referred to public opinion and the specific protests on the issue. This is then mapped against the timeline of the protest events to establish whether there is a correlation between the protests and policymakers’ perception of public opinion on the protested issue. For example, if a policy issue was already debated in the EP but never mentioned in connection with public opinion, but once the protests took place this connection between public opinion and the debated issue is made by policymakers, a connection between the protests and policymakers’ perceived salience of the issue can be established.

Finally, to operationalise the elite-conflict mechanism, first, the initial positions of the involved actors are carefully reconstructed to establish whether or not a conflict on the protest issue already existed before the protest took place. Then, these actors’ positions on the issue are traced over time, paying attention to any reference to the protests in statements and debates. Further, this is triangulated with interview data in which actors were asked directly about their perception of underlying conflicts. Initially tracing each of these mechanisms individually enables me to then draw connections between these mechanisms and determine in which ways they were working independently from each other, and in which ways they triggered or reinforced each other, and ultimately contributed to the policy outcome in the case of TTIP.

Empirical findings

The analysis of parliamentary questions in conjunction with in-depth interviews with MEPs shows that the protests reframed the rather technical issue of the trade agreement early on. This in turn increased the salience of the TTIP issue among the public and subsequently changed policymakers’ perceptions of the attitudes of the public towards the proposed agreement, as shown in Figure 2. Simultaneously, the reframed problem definition of the TTIP agreement led to a lasting shift of its policy image that also transferred into parliamentary debates and changed the stance of some policymakers on TTIP by informing them about issues they had not been aware of. Subsequently, the reframed problem definition and perceived high salience led to partisan as well as inter-institutional conflict on the issue, turning some MEPs into political allies. In what follows, I will turn to each of these findings.

Figure 2. Protest impact mechanisms in the case of TTIP.

The reframed policy image and its impact on the parliamentary debate

… and when the chlorinated chicken was suddenly no longer important, then there was the subject of secret negotiations, and then the subject of arbitration courts came up, and then one always had to look for arguments, […] and if there was no good argument, these topics would keep coming back. (Interview 4)

Negotiations of international trade agreements do not always attract a large amount of public attention, both due to the nature of the issue and the fact that they are negotiated behind closed doors. The negotiations for the TTIP agreement, however, became subject to unprecedented public scrutiny. The Commission recognised early on that there was a ‘need for ”strong political communication” in order to ‘define the terms of debate’ on TTIP”’ (Garcia-Duran and Eliasson 2017). Still, CSOs that opposed TTIP managed to redefine the problem definition of the issue and fundamentally change its policy image by constructing emotive frames (Siles-Brügge 2017) that suggested that the agreement was a threat to European health, social and environmental standards, as well as a threat to European democracy itself.

At the beginning of the anti-TTIP protests, the issue of the negotiations lacking transparency was one of the main focuses of the debate. In July 2014, 48 CSOs submitted an initiative denouncing the secrecy of the process and asking the Commission to stop the negotiations (Heldt 2020). Later in the year, the Commission published some of the negotiation documents, choosing to take a ‘selective transparency approach with full transparency on market access but partial transparency on regulatory issues’ (Heldt 2020, 224). This in turn led to an even bigger outcry and in March 2015, 375 CSOs published an open letter to the European Parliament, demanding that all negotiation documents be made fully transparent (Heldt 2020). In the first half of 2015, health and consumer protection, environmental protection and the proposed ISDS mechanism as well as issues related to the state and democracy thematically played the biggest role at anti-TTIP protest events (Bauer 2016). While the issues relating to transparency, standards and the ISDS mechanism later lost momentum and were brought up less at events, issues pertaining to public services and infrastructure kept dominating events related to TTIP in the second half of 2015 and the first half of 2016 (Bauer 2016).

Parliamentary questions issued in the European Parliament followed the agenda of the anti-TTIP events to a large extent. As Figure 3 shows, environmental protection, the ISDS mechanism and the transparency of negotiations were most present during the height of the protests in the first half of 2015 and lost momentum thereafter. Health, food, and social standards, however, clearly dominated the parliamentary debate in the first half of 2015 but were still highly salient in the first half of 2016. One possible explanation for the high peak in salience of questions around health, food, and social standards in the first half of 2016 is that it coincides with the leak of a negotiation document in May 2016 that showed that issues around food, health, and environmental issues, which had long been ‘deemed non-negotiable, were in fact still on the table’ (Søndergaard 2020, 286).

Figure 3. TTIP-related parliamentary questions by subcategory.

Generally, parliamentary questions regarding TTIP declined largely in sync with the decline of protest events. However, questions surrounding public opinion on TTIP were still present in the parliamentary debate in the second half of 2016. Further, MEPs were still concerned about the ratification process of a possible agreement, and about the state of the negotiations, when protests had already largely died down (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. TTIP-related parliamentary questions by issue category.

While many MEPs viewed the framing of these issues as a threat to European democracy and European standards as being misguided, misinformed or deliberately misinforming, overdrawn, and hypocritical (Interviews 2, 3, 4 and 7), these frames still clearly influenced the agenda of the European Parliament and became the determining issues there, too.

However, the anti-TTIP protests did not only reframe the problem definition and subsequently impact the way the issue was debated in the EP. In some cases, they also changed the preferences of policymakers’ themselves by bringing their attention to issues they had not noticed before. One MEP from the S&D group described that

only through the protests did I learn about the investment protection issues with the private courts of arbitration. I had not been aware of that, because up until TTIP, those kinds of agreements were usually just rubber-stamped by us, most of us parliamentarians, at least if you were not a member of the Committee on International Trade. In that respect did the protest movement, which was so massive that it was impossible to ignore, really give me a few things to think about and certainly influenced my decision, at least on some of the details. (Interview 1)

Other S&D members similarly said that while they were ultimately in favour of the agreement, the protests and campaigns against TTIP made them aware of specific issues that they thought would have had to be resolved before they would have voted in favour of an agreement, had it come to a vote.

Public attitudes towards TTIP and policymakers’ perceptions thereof

It certainly makes an impression when you realise, this is not just a little sect of people, this is a broad movement within society. (Interview 6)

As Eliasson and Garcia-Duran Huet (2018) show, the anti-TTIP protests altered the policy preferences of the public significantly. Not only did the issue become much more salient, but citizens also turned more critical towards the negotiations as the increase in negatively framed Google and YouTube searches between 2014 and 2016 shows. Drawing on Eurobarometer data, they also show that while public opinion on free trade generally did not change, public opinion on the TTIP negotiations specifically turned negative. In Germany, which saw more anti-TTIP protests than any other European country, more than half of the population rejected the agreement by 2015 (Gheyle and Rone 2022).

A look at the parliamentary questions issued over the course of the anti-TTIP protests reveals that MEPs were acutely aware of the protests against the TTIP negotiations. Between the first half of 2014 and the first half of 2016, an overall number of 784 protest events related to TTIP took place in Italy, Spain, France, the UK, Germany, Austria and at the EU level (Caiani and Graziano 2018). The largest portion of these, 172, took place in Germany. The number of events increased steadily from the first half of 2014 until the first half of 2015, when the number of events peaked and decreased again in the second half of 2015, until it was at its lowest in the first half of 2016. In terms of intensity, the number of protesters attending these events peaked somewhat later in the second half of 2015, when an overall number of 3,200,000 people took to the streets to protest against the planned TTIP agreement. Figure 5 shows that this development is clearly mirrored in the attention the TTIP negotiations received from MEPs in the form of parliamentary questions issued during that time, which similarly peaked in the first half of 2015.

Figure 5. TTIP-related protest events in Spain, France, Italy, the UK, Germany, Austria and at EU level (own depiction based on Caiani and Graziano 2018); TTIP-related parliamentary questions issued between 2014 and 2016.

The content of the parliamentary questions shows that MEPs did not only inquire about substantive or procedural issues relating to the TTIP negotiations, but specifically referenced the pressure of public opinion, the ongoing protests, and the growing discontent among the wider European public. As shown in Figure 5, the number of parliamentary questions referring to public opinion and protests regarding TTIP mirrors the development of the protests, as well as the parliamentary questions issued in general, with a high peak in the first half of 2015. In February 2015, EPP member and Greek MEP Manolis Kefalogiannis for example asked, ‘Given the importance of the TTIP, negotiations have attracted interest from millions of Europeans. However, the lack of transparency surrounding the negotiations has caused uproar throughout Europe […] How does [the Commission] intend to improve transparency in negotiations […]?’ (Kefalogiannis 2015).

The change in perceptions of public preferences among policymakers is also reflected in the narratives MEPs shared during the in-depth interviews. While it became clear to MEPs that public attention and wide-spread discontent were growing, there was a difference in how the campaigns in Brussels were perceived in comparison to those protest events that took place in the domestic context in Germany, depending on which interviewees were asked. Especially those MEPs who were generally in favour of the TTIP agreement questioned whether what they perceived as highly professional campaigns in Brussels really represented a broader movement of worried citizens, or whether they were orchestrated by a small number of people with a ‘clever idea’ (Interview 4), and some suggested that in their view, these campaigns were successful mostly because they were very well funded. The protests that happened in the domestic context in Germany were perceived differently and mostly mentioned by MEPs opposing TTIP. An MEP from the Greens/EFA group described a typical protest event in southern Germany as involving

rebellious anarchist young people who spoke out against […] the negative consequences of globalization, there were also old anti-imperialism slogans, there were the slightly older citizens, […], there were housewives, consumer protection initiatives, local food cooperatives, organic farmers and so on who made a connection to the production and consumption of food. (Interview 5)

All MEPs interviewed for this study referenced large-scale email campaigns as having made a strong impression on how they perceived the protests and public attitudes towards the TTIP agreement. At the height of these campaigns, MEPs would receive several thousand emails every day, often in exact similar wording but coming from different senders, asking them to position themselves against TTIP or specific issues that were negotiated at the time. Those MEPs who were (at least initially) in favour of TTIP and deemed the protesters to be misguided and misinformed, perceived these email campaigns as especially bothersome, describing them as ‘destructive and not based on facts’ (Interview 7), and claiming that these campaigns made the whole anti-TTIP movement particularly unappealing. One MEP from the EPP group questioned whether those mass emails against TTIP, but also more generally mass emails that were part of other campaigns, were really sent by informed citizens who cared about the issue: ‘it only takes three or four clicks, and [the question is] whether this is really activism, or actually just melancholy in the evening, or it’s done after eight beers in the night … ’ (Interview 4). On the other hand, other MEPs who were more sympathetic to the protests in general described the mass email campaigns in a more positive light and viewed them as a legitimate expression of citizens’ worries regarding the agreement, saying that ‘it was actually not bad, the people in these campaigns signalled us, ‘we are watching you!’‘ (Interview 5). A large majority of the interviewed MEPs agreed that ultimately, through the mass demonstrations as well as the sustained email campaigns, they became convinced that public disagreement with TTIP was not just coming from a small group of activists but was widespread among the public, albeit some believed this widespread disagreement was based on misinformation about the contents and consequences of the agreement. One MEP from the S&D group remarked that ‘it certainly makes an impression when you realise, this is not just a little sect of people, this is a broad movement within society’ (Interview 6).

While the MEPs that were interviewed for this study were all German, a look at the distribution of parliamentary questions disaggregated along national lines shows that MEPs from other Member States with a high level of politicisation on TTIP were similarly active in responding to it and can thus be seen to have been similarly impacted by it. The protests against TTIP were especially pronounced in France, the UK, Italy, Spain and Germany, with the latter being the member state with the most frequent as well as the largest protest events (Caiani and Graziano 2018), while other member states saw little to no protest on the trade agreement. Figure 6 shows that a look at the nationality of the authors of parliamentary questions on TTIP reveals that indeed, these questions were dominated by MEPs from Member States with high levels of protests against TTIP. French MEPs were the most frequent issuers of parliamentary questions, followed by MEPs from Spain, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and the UK. Together, MEPs from these six Member States accounted for 63% of all parliamentary questions on TTIP. This finding underlines how sensitive the theorised protest impact mechanisms are to the national context of the Member States. The reason that there is a high or low level of politicisation in the first place will differ depending on the national context, as Rone (2018) has shown for the cases of TTIP mobilisation in Germany, Italy, Bulgaria and the UK. However, and more importantly for the purpose of this study, this finding also shows that protest impact is mediated by MEPs’ perception of the relevance of the protest within their respective national contexts.

Figure 6. TTIP-related questions issued between 2014 and 2016, by nationality.

Partisan and inter-institutional conflict on TTIP in the EP

… the Greens celebrate themselves, saying they just supported massive citizen participation, and I see it more as a directed protest. (Interview 7)

The debate around TTIP early on turned into a partisan debate in the European Parliament, with members of Greens, GUE/NGL, S&D and NI group voicing concerns about the planned agreement most frequently in the form of parliamentary questions, and members of the EPP and ALDE groups being most openly in favour of it. In the interviews, members of the Greens described themselves as supportive of the protests, S&D members described being more torn on whether or not to support the protests, and members of the EPP, ALDE and ECR groups described being very critical of the protests. MEPs of all political groups described the Greens as being the first group to voice concerns against the agreement, centring their arguments around environmental concerns, although they did not make as much use of parliamentary questions as most other groups (see Figure 7). A member of the Greens remembered how it became apparent to them at anti-TTIP protests that a vast majority of protesters belonged to the core base of Green voters. They described how a fellow Green party member in the German domestic context at the time of a regional election was initially in favour of or at least not opposing the TTIP agreement,

Figure 7. TTIP-related parliamentary questions by political group, selection of issues.

But he recognized that if he comes out with something else [than the rest of us], even if he tries to discuss things in a differentiated way, he actually damages the election victory, and election success is ultimately what it is about, even in the European elections, that always comes first. (Interview 5)

The S&D group was described as the most undecided, with some members fervently opposing, others being in favour of the agreement, and some members of each camp then changing their minds over the course of the protests. One S&D member described how the protests had led to amendments of the draft agreement that ultimately convinced them of the overall benefit of it, while another S&D member described how issues concerning environmental and consumer protection, which were brought to the fore by the anti-TTIP campaigns, ultimately made some S&D members see the agreement in a more negative light and likely to vote against it. The realisation that German trade unions, traditionally closely connected to the Social Democrats, joined forces with the Green party in their opposition, further contributed to the change of mind of some members of the latter camp.

Although several groups on both the left and right were very active in terms of issuing questions to the Commission (see Figure 7), the content of these questions varied significantly between political groups. Taking for example questions on transparency and public opinion, it becomes apparent that, while members of the GUE/NGL group sharply criticised the Commission for the lack of transparency, members of the EPP group were asking what the Commissions’ plans were to communicate better the benefits of the agreement. A similar caveat is in order for the issues around preservation of EU standards, which members of the GUE/NGL, S&D, EPP and NI groups all issued many questions on. While GUE/NGL and S&D inquired mainly about the preservation of social standards and consumer protection, members of the EPP and NI groups were more concerned with the standards for and protection of regional products.

Members of different party groups were just as split in their assessment of the legitimacy and justification of the protests against TTIP as they were on the issue itself. Interviewed members of the EPP, ALDE and ECR groups, who were in favour of the agreement, tended to portray the protests as being top-down directed by well organised campaigners, and one described them as ‘disingenuous’ (Interview 2). One MEP accused their fellow parliamentarians of the Green and Left parties to have used the protests to ‘celebrate themselves, saying they just supported massive citizen participation’ (Interview 7), when in fact this was not what it was, according to this MEP. To the contrary, members of the Greens and S&D groups, who shared the protesters concerns, perceived the anti-TTIP protests as genuine, large-scale showings of citizens’ opinion.

Just as much as there was a conflict line between different groups in the parliament, the anti-TTIP protests also brought to the fore inter-institutional conflict between the European Parliament and the Commission. The very high overall number of parliamentary questions is a first indicator of this, as parliamentarians use this tool to keep the Commission in check and voice opposition even when they do not have more competencies to actively shape the policy process.

Secondly, looking into parliamentary questions referring to the lack of transparency also shows that many parliamentarians felt that not only public opinion was ignored by the Commission, but the parliament itself too. GUE/NGL member Anne-Marie Mineur for example asked, “Commissioner Malmström announced that no more reports on the TTIP negotiations would be sent to the EU Member States. At the same time, on her blog, she advocates greater transparency of the TTIP negotiations […] How can this be reconciled with democratic control and with the Commissioner’s statements about greater transparency and sharing information with the national authorities of the Member States, Members of the European Parliament and national parliamentarians?” (Mineur 2015). Many of the parliamentary questions referring to transparency were phrased along similar lines.

Finally, it became clear in the interviews with MEPs of all groups that they also perceive their role as being the most connected to citizens, and their task as the only elected body of the EU being to amplify the voice of European citizens and represent their constituents vis-à-vis the Commission. Supporters and opponents of the TTIP agreement alike blamed the Commission for its role in the process of the negotiations and protests – opponents for failing to consider the wishes and concerns of a large majority of the population, supporters for failing to communicate better the benefits of the agreement.

Conclusion

The analysis in this paper explores how the anti-TTIP protests impacted the debate on TTIP in the EP, arguing that it was a dynamic process made of interdependent sequences and various actors. First, the anti-TTIP campaigns fundamentally reframed the problem definition of the TTIP agreement. This led to a lasting shift of the policy image which transferred into the parliamentary debates on the issue. Further, the anti-TTIP protests changed policymakers’ perceptions of the attitudes of the wider public towards the proposed agreement. Finally, the protests altered the policy preferences not just of the public, but of policymakers themselves, and created partisan as well as inter-institutional conflict on the issue.

This study has uncovered that MEPs find themselves in a peculiar role in responding to protest. On the one hand, they must react to pressures from the public. As a Green MEP interviewed for this paper stated, ‘election success is ultimately what it is about, even in the European elections, that always comes first’ (Interview 5). On the other hand, as members of an EU institution that has sought to increase its influence in recent years, MEPs are incentivised to become political allies of movements in order to challenge the Commission, especially when they perceive their own significance to be omitted by the Commission. This was the case for the debates around the lack of transparency in the negotiations. Finally, as members of political groups, MEPs are part of partisan conflict and align themselves accordingly when they react to protest. This does not only hold true for their view of the protest issue, but it even guides their judgement on the justification and legitimacy of the protests. Those MEPs that were strongly in favour of the TTIP agreement judged the protests as misguided, false, and even as not coming from actual civil society, but from well-funded professionals. To the contrary, those MEPs who tended to oppose the TTIP agreement, be it for environmental, anti-globalisation or other reasons, described the protests as coming from a broad part of the population. There are several possible explanations for this. First, regarding MEPs’ judgement of the legitimacy of the anti-TTIP protests, it is important to note that interviewed MEPs displayed differing views on protest as a form political participation in general. Whereas several interviewed MEPs from the Greens, for example, described the act of protesting as a positive and important way of citizen participation, a member of the EPP described their hesitation towards responding to a ‘loud minority’, that might not necessarily represent the opinion of the broader citizenry. It is noteworthy that both of these groups have grown out of very different party-political traditions, where the Greens have historically been involved with protest movements, having themselves grown out of one. This speaks for their members generally displaying a more sympathetic stance towards protest. Secondly, let’s consider the TTIP protests specifically. The claims made by anti-TTIP protesters were ideologically very much in line with left and Green positions, for example by focusing on environmental standards. TTIP proponents, on the other hand, focused on the benefits of free trade, which is ideologically much more consistent with the liberal and conservative parties. In that sense, there was a strong ideological divide that aligned with the ideological cleavage of the involved political groups in the first place. In addition, a Green member interviewed for this study also stated specifically that they at some point realised that those protesting were to a large extent part of the Green voter base. This will have further contributed to Green MEPs embracing the protesters and their claims more so than MEPs from other groups.

The story of the impact of protest on MEPs during the TTIP negotiations is in many ways similar to that of protest impact on MEPs during the negotiations for ACTA. Here, too, opposition against the agreement within the EP was initially sparked by the perceived lack of transparency in the Commission’s communication (Crespy and Parks 2017), creating elite conflict that turned some MEPs into allies in opposing the agreement. Further, campaigns against the agreement led to an increase in public salience that subsequently changed MEPs perception of public opinion on the issue. Crespy and Parks argue that ‘[t]he protests and their aftermath thus made MEPs more susceptible to opposition arguments in a climate of increasing public awareness and anti-ACTA sentiment appealing to the institution’s desire to be seen as a champion of citizens’ rights’ (Crespy and Parks 2017, 460). Finally, CSOs as well as sympathetic MEPs who campaigned against ACTA managed to reframe the issue in a way that moved the focus of discussion within the parliament away from the contents of the agreement, and towards fundamental issues of democracy and transparency (Crespy and Parks 2017, 459).

However, while ACTA was rejected in a vote by the EP in June 2012, it never came to a vote on TTIP in the EP as the Commission had already frozen the negotiations. Had it come to a vote on TTIP in the EP, would there have been a similar outcome? Asked about what, in their perception, the role of the anti-TTIP protests in contributing to the end of the negotiations was, MEPs from three different political groups reasoned that it had simply become clear to the Commission that the agreement would not be ratified by the European Parliament, let alone some of the national parliaments, as too many parliamentarians had started to side with the protesters (Interviews 5–7).

The theoretical framework developed in this contribution is the first attempt to expand the movement mechanism framework to take into account the complex and unique context of the EU. Further, this approach has produced crucial findings that help scholars of EU studies rethink the impact of protest on policy-making in a way that compliments and extends the responsiveness literature. This study also exposes how central elite conflict is to understanding movement impact on EU policy-making. At the same time, these findings point towards the potential of protest to substantially shape policy-making processes in the European Parliament. Moving beyond a single case study and taking a comparative perspective could serve as an interesting future research endeavour, especially because it is only to be expected that protest movements will continue to play an important role in shaping EU politics, and with it EU policy.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Pieter van Houten, Xavier Romero-Vidal, Manuela Caiani, Maximilian Fenner, Bruno Schmidt-Feuerheerd and two anonymous reviewers for this journal for their helpful and constructive comments on previous versions of this manuscript. Thanks are also due to the organisers and participants of the Workshop “Issues and Perspectives in the Study of Social Movement Impacts” in Geneva (May 2022) for their thorough and kind engagement with an early version of this article. I would also like to warmly thank the interviewees of this study for generously providing their time and insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Methodological Appendix

Interview Data

Table A1. Interviews and interviewees.

Number	Date and time	Interviewee and type of interview
1	19.04.2022, 11.30 am	MEP, Member of S&D group (video call)
2	21.04.2022	MEP, Member of ECR group (written interview)
3	21.04.2022	MEP, Member of ALDE group (written interview)
4	21.04.2022, 4 pm	MEP, Member of EPP group (phone call)
5	27.04.2022, 8 am	MEP, Member of Greens-EFA group (video call)
6	28.04.2022, 9.30 am	MEP, Member of S&D group (phone call)
7	02.05.2022, 11.30 am	MEP, Member of EPP group (phone call)
8	17.05.2022, 10 am	MEP, Member of Greens-EFA group (phone call)

While the interviews were only semi-structured and left as much room as possible for interviewees to expand on the themes they deemed most significant, I included the following questions in the guide for each interview:

• Between 2014 and 2016, large-scale protests and demonstrations against the planned TTIP agreement took place across Europe, but especially in Germany. How did you feel about these protests back then? Did your attitude towards the protests change over the course of those almost three years?

• Did you react to these protests in any way? (This can be both informal, for example in discussions with colleagues, or formal in your capacity as MEP, for example in the form of questions in Parliament or in working groups, the parliamentary group, etc.).

• Can you remember how the various groups in the EP positioned themselves on the protests (your own party group or also the others)? Did these positionings change over time?

• In your opinion, what were the main reasons for the failure of the TTIP negotiations?

• Thinking about EU-related protests in general, which of the EU institutions do you think are the most receptive to protest movements? And which ones are the most closed?