Measuring and Analysing the Politicisation of Europe before and after the Eurozone Crisis

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Publications

Consequences of EU Politicisation for Voting in National Elections

Publication . Lobo, Marina Costa

In this Chapter, the conclusions of the research in the book as a whole are discussed. The book provides very strong multimethod evidence of the ability of voters to express their EU preferences when selecting national representatives at legislative elections, and how media and parliamentary parties condition it. Our double perspective on EU politicisation in the media and parliamentary debates lead to novel findings on the concept. In terms of salience and contestation, we found that the media and parliamentary debates follow different logics, with contestation being substantially higher in the media than in Parliaments. In terms of EU dimensions, we found that it is mostly policies being discussed in relation to the EU in both arenas. Yet, in this respect there are differences between countries: while Germany and Ireland discuss EU policies per se to a larger extent, in Southern Europe EU policies are discussed in relation to domestic issues. Looking at the consequences of politicisation, through experimental analysis, it is established that EU attitudes are a cause rather than a consequence of voting behaviour. Using observational data, we find that EU attitudes matter for both main mainstream and challenger parties, for parties which are Eurosceptic but also pro-EU parties, even if they do not replace the importance of the left-right dimension. Politicisation in both media and parliamentary debates are associated with the strength of EU issue voting. We conclude that the national channel of EU accountability, and namely the domestic institutions which contribute to it, need to be placed at the centre of the debate on how to hold the EU accountable.

2023Book part

Open access

“Do perceptions of EMU alter clarity of responsibility? A comparison of German and Greek electorates”

Publication . Lobo, Marina Costa; Pannico, Roberto

The goal of this paper is to understand whether perceptions of supranationalisation of economic policy mitigate economic voting in the Eurozone. We focus on two countries with divergent performances in the Eurozone: Germany and Greece, and make use of a novel dataset, which contains all necessary items to test this hypothesis. Our comprehensive vote model shows that in both countries economic voting occurs. However, once we interact perceptions of EU responsibility with perceptions of economic performance, we obtain diverging results: in Germany, the weight of economic perceptions on vote increases when citizens assign a higher responsibility to the EU for the country's economic situation. This is the opposite of what the “blurring of responsibility” posits. On the contrary, Greek electors are in line with expectations of our main hypothesis. Moreover, in this country we also found support for the idea that only citizens with a high level of political sophistication are able to incorporate the distribution of responsibilities for the economic policy in their vote calculus. Our results suggest that the blurring of responsibility effect on the vote may not be systematic across the Eurozone.

2021Journal article

Open access

GREECE WAVE 3 Pre-election Study

Publication . Lobo, Marina Costa; Kartalis, Efstratios-Ioannis; Santos, Nelson; Pannico, Roberto; Silva, Tiago

This study is part of the MAPLE Project, ERC – European Research Council Grant, 682125, which aims to study the Politicisation of the EU before and after the Eurozone Crisis in Belgium, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. In each of these countries an online panel will be carried out just before and just after the legislative elections. This report pertains to the pre-election panel of Greece legislative elections 2019 to be held on 7 July. Our questionnaire seeks to model the political context of political choices, and to understand the importance which European attitudes may have in voting behaviour. In Greece, we have partnered with Metron Analysis. We present in this report a number of political attitudes according to stated partisanship in Greece. We are interested in the way in which partisan preferences are related to political attitudes, including national issues as well as those pertaining to the EU. The target population is the general voting population aged >17 years old using the Census 2011 data. The sample size is 800. The fieldwork was done using Computer Assisted Telephone methodology and the fieldwork took place between 07/06/2019 and 21/06/2019. The sample followed and fulfilled a socio demographic matrix which crossed four quotas: gender (male, female); age (17-34; 35-55; 56-65;66+); education (up to secondary; post-secondary), as well as region (Northern, Mainland, Attica, Islands). The resulting dataset was weighted according to a weight combining gender (male, female), age (17-34; 35-55; 56-65;66+) and education (up to secondary; post-secondary) at NUTS1 level. The survey response rate was 12%. The margin of error for this survey is +/-3.5%. To measure partisanship we used the following questions: the respondent was asked if s/he felt close to a party. To those who replied no in the first question, they were asked a second time, namely if they felt closer to one party than others. Only those who repeated no in this question too were coded as “without party id”. All others were coded with their stated party identification. In the results we show all parties that 2% or more of respondents identify with.

2019-06Report

Open access

Highlighting supranational institutions? An automated analysis of EU politicisation (2002–2017)

Publication . Silva, Tiago; Kartalis, Yani; Lobo, Marina Costa

This article examines, using automated text analyses, the EU politicisation in the media of six Eurozone countries (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain), between 2002 and 2017. By contrasting creditor and debtor countries, the article analyses how the Eurozone crisis affected the politicisation of the EU and its institutions using a unique dataset of 165,341 articles from 12 newspapers. The results show that the Eurozone crisis increased the politicisation of the EU, particularly in the countries that were at the forefront of the Eurozone bailouts. Importantly, the crisis contributed as well to a more multifaceted news coverage of the European Union, namely with a greater emphasis given to supranational institutions vis-à-vis intergovernmental ones. Yet, this supranational coverage was associated with the increasingly negative tone of articles. To that extent, this study shows that greater mention of EU institutions may not necessarily contribute to a Europeanisation of public debates. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1910778

2021Journal article

Open access

Parties Acting Strategically: National Parliaments’ Role in Holding the EU Accountable

Publication . Kartalis, Yani; Silva, Tiago

The existing assessments of EU politicization have predominantly focused on the media and in the actors that are reported in that arena. This chapter offers a novel approach to the study of EU politicization by focusing, instead, on the institutional arena of six EU countries. Using the MAPLE dataset of parliamentary debates, with a total of 724,963 speeches covering a period of 20 years, this chapter offers a comparative and longitudinal analysis of EU politicization at the institutional level, assessing the impact that the Eurozone crisis had in the parliamentary debates of the EU. Automated and manual content analysis methods are used to answer three main questions: Has the EU been politicized at the institutional level? Did the Eurozone crisis affect the politicization of the EU in parliaments? What characteristics of political parties have determined the salience and contestation of the EU topic? Our results suggest that the EU has not been, in the past 20 years, a very salient nor contested topic at the institutional level. However, we find that the parties’ contribution to the democratic legitimacy of the European integration varies significantly, with the parties’ position on the EU topic being the strongest determinant of EU politicization.

2023Book part

Open access