This time it’s different? Effects of the Eurovision Debate on young citizens and its consequence for EU democracy – evidence from a quasi-experiment in 24 countries

ABSTRACT

For the very first time in EU history, the 2014 EP elections provided citizens with the opportunity to influence the nomination of the Commission President by casting a vote for the main Europarties’ ‘lead candidates’. By subjecting the position of the Commission President to an open political contest, many experts have formulated the expectation that heightened political competition would strengthen the weak electoral connection between EU citizens and EU legislators, which some consider a root cause for the EU’s lack of public support. In particular, this contest was on display in the so-called ‘Eurovision Debate’, a televised debate between the main contenders for the Commission President broadcasted live across Europe. Drawing on a quasi-experimental study conducted in 24 EU countries, we find that debate exposure led to increased cognitive and political involvement and EU support among young citizens. Unfortunately, the debate has only reached a very small audience.

KEYWORDS:

• EP election campaign
• EU attitudes
• political knowledge
• televised debate

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jürgen Maier is Professor of Political Communication at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.

Thorsten Faas is Professor of Political Science at the University of Mainz, Germany

Berthold Rittberger is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Munich, Germany

Jessica Fortin-Rittberger is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Salzburg, Austria

Kalliope Agapiou Josephides , PhD Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, is Assistant Professor and Jean Monnet Chair in European Political Integration (2001) at the University of Cyprus, Cyprus

Susan Banducci is professor in Politics and director of the Exeter Q-Step Centre at the University of Exeter, UK

Paolo Bellucci is Professor of Political Science at the University of Siena, Italy

Magnus Blomgren is Associated Professor in Political Science at Umeå University, Sweden

Inta Brikse was Professor of Communication, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia

Karol Chwedczuk-Szulc is Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Wrocław, Poland

Marina Costa Lobo is Principal Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal

Mikolaj Cześnik is Professor of Political Science at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland, and a member of the Polish National Election Study team Anastasia Deligiaouri is Adjunct Assistant Professor in Political Communication at the Western Macedonia University of Applied Sciences (TEI), Kastoria, Greece

Tomaž Deželan is Associate Professor of political science and Jean Monnet Chair for citizenship education at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Wouter de Nooy is a member of ASCoR Amsterdam School of Communication, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Aldo Di Virgilio was Professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna, Italy

Florin Fesnic is a researcher at the University of Cluj, Cluj, Romania

Danica Fink-Hafner is Professor of Political parties, interest groups and policy analysis, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Marijana Grbeša is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Carmen Gabriela Greab is Researcher at Babes-Bolyai University, Faculty of Political Science, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Andrija Henjak is a researcher at the University of Zagreb, Croatia

David Nicolas Hopmann is professor with special responsibilities (mso) at the Centre for Journalism, Department of Political Science, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

David Johann is Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Vienna, Austria

Gábor Jelenfi is researcher at the MTA-ELTE Peripato Research Group, Faculty of Social Science, Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest, Hungary

Jurate Kavaliauskaite is a researcher at Vilnius University, Lithuania, and a member of the Lithuanian National Election Study team

Zoltán Kmetty is a Research Fellow at MTA-ELTE Peripato reserach group, and Senior Lecturer at the Eötvös Loránd University Faculty of Social Science, Hungary

Sylvia Kritzinger is Professor for Methods in the Social Sciences at the Department of Government, University of Vienna, Austria

Pedro C. Magalhães is research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal

Vincent Meyer is a sociologist, Professor of information and communication sciences, at the University Nice Sophia Antipolis, France

Katia Mihailova is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Media and Communications at the Department of Economic Sociology, UNWE, Sofia, Bulgaria

Mihail Mirchev is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Political Studies, UNWE, Sofia, Bulgaria

Ville Pitkänen is senior researcher at the Centre for Parliamentary Studies, University of Turku, Finland

Ainė Ramonaitė is Professor of Political Science at Vilnius University, Lithuania

Theresa Reidy is a lecturer in the Department of Government at University College Cork, Ireland

Marek Rybar is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic

Carmen Sammut is a researcher at the University of Malta, Msida, Malta

José Santana-Pereira is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal, and a Guest Assistant Professor at ISCTE-IUL, Portugal

Guna Spurava is a researcher at the University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia

Lia-Paschalia Spyridou is Lecturer in Journalism and Media at the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cyprus, Cyprus.

Adriana Stefanel , doctor in Sociology, Assistant Profesor at the University of Bucharest, Romania

Václav Štětka is Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies, Loughborough University, UK, and Senior Researcher at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic

Aleksander Surdej is Professor of International Political Economy at the Cracow University of Economics and the head of the Department of European Studies

Róbert Tardos , Senior Research Fellow, Peripato Research Group of Comparative Social Dynamics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at ELTE University, Budapest, Hungary

Dimitris Trimithiotis is Adjunct Lecturer of Media at the University of Cyprus, Cyprus

Crisiano Vezzoni is researcher at the University of Trento, Italy

Aneta Világi is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia

Gergo Zavecz is a researcher at the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

ORCID

Sylvia Kritzinger http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2765-8200

Notes

1 See Franklin (2014: 9–10) for a critical assessment of the institutional change adopted in the Lisbon Treaty. He expects that it is rather unlikely that national parties will design their campaigns around the issues highlighted by the different candidates running for Commission President.

2 See, e.g., http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/editorial-on-the-importance-of-the-eu-election-for-european-democracy-a-971766.html; accessed 21 February 2016; http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/eu-elections-2014-a-vote-for-europe--or-simply-a-chance-to-put-the-boot-in-9406013.html; http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-22904941; accessed 29 May 2015.

3 At the same time, increasing competition could also carry negative consequences for the EU’s democratic legitimacy. In particular, since political competition creates winners and losers, losers might not ‘accept the winning coalition as legitimate’ (Hix 2008: 188). Moreover, others argue that enhanced political competition unleashes a ‘sleeping giant’ (van der Eijk and Franklin 2004: 32), by activating pro or anti EU-orientations, especially when debates revolve around constitutive issues, which relate to the EU’s institutional trajectory or its membership base (see Bartolini 2005).

4 For a transcript of the debate see Maier and Faas (2014).

5 In most instances, the debate was watched on TV on 15 May 2014. In some countries, the debate was broadcasted via an Internet live-stream, but not on TV. In addition, in some states the debate was videotaped and broadcasted the next day (see online appendix 2). Due to technical reasons (e.g., because the university was closed when the debate was aired live on TV) recipients in the Czech Republic, France, Romania (Cluj), and Sweden watched the videotaped debate.

6 The remaining 8.2 per cent of the sample started with the simultaneous translation but had to switch to the EBU version due to either bad translation or technical problems.

7 In general, the questionnaires were in English. In some countries, the questionnaires were translated in the native language.

8 Overall, these respondents did understand the debate very well, as their answers show. Only four of these respondents indicated that they understood only about half of the debate. The exclusion of these respondents from data analysis does not affect our results.

9 In seven countries, recipients additionally had the opportunity to spontaneously evaluate the candidates during the debate. To do so, they used a web-based RTR push button system (for a description of the system see Maier et al. 2016). Using this system, individual positive and negative reactions to candidate messages were recorded on a second-by-second basis. Real-time response measurement of candidate messages was successfully implemented in Germany, Poland, Slovenia, and United Kingdom including 210 participants. As it has been demonstrated that using RTR technique in general neither distracts people from following the debate nor increases attention to the debate (Maier 2012), it seems unlikely that this treatment will affect the variables in focus of this paper.

10 It has been shown that in experimental studies with self-recruited participants having a very high level of general interest in politics questionnaire-induced pretest-posttest differences are very rare (see, e.g., Lupfer and Wald 1979). In addition, our pretest-questionnaires show for specific debate-related questions that the specific knowledge is rather low to non-existent. Against this backdrop, the pretest-questionnaire is unlikely to activate pre-existing knowledge.

11 We have tested the existence of pretest-posttest differences for a control group for the design that has been applied to the European debate in the context of the 2013 German Federal Election (the data can be downloaded via www.gesis.org/wahlen/gles/daten/; study number ZA5711) and did not find any significant changes for campaign interest, political efficacy, and for different measures of EU-related attitudes for the control group.

12 An analysis of the unweighted or differently weighted data indicates that our weighting procedure does not cause an exaggeration of debate effects: About half of the observed influences are slightly stronger if we do not weight the data or if weight all countries equally whereas the other half is slightly weaker. Furthermore, applying other weighting strategies does not change the reported results substantially. The only exception is that Tsipras is perceived as significantly more in favour of EU integration after the debate than before if these data are not weighted or if we weight all countries equally (p < .05). In the data presented in Table 2 this effect is insignificant. In addition, country differences tend to be more often statistically significant if no or an alternative weighting procedure is used. The results for these alternative weighting procedures are provided in online appendix 3.

13 Our data analyses also show that the reactions to the debate were far from homogenous across the different EU member states: The between-country differences of the measured debate effects display statistical significance for all variables included in our study. Since the goal of this contribution was to look at the aggregate picture, we can neither report nor discuss and explain the potential causes of the observed cross-country differences here, but these findings will need further exploration. In addition, our findings suggest that lessons about the impact of the debate cannot simply be transferred from one country to another. Obviously, the domestic context matters for the effect of campaign messages (see, e.g., Hobolt 2014).

14 For the debate media sweep surrounding the debate, see European Broadcasting Union (2014b).

15 To our knowledge there is no information about the total reach of the debate.