News vs. Opinion Articles on the European Union: The Politicisation of the EU in the Mainstream Press

Abstract

This chapter assesses the politicisation of the EU in six European countries, by looking at the media coverage of 29 legislative elections held between 2002 and 2017. Using a combination of automated and manual methods of content analysis, this chapter goes beyond the existing studies to examine how the Eurozone crises impacted the traditional media coverage of the EU not only in terms of magnitude but also in terms of framing and content. Using a unique dataset of 165,341 news items, from 12 mainstream newspapers, this study answers three questions relevant to the main goal of this book: (1) does EU politicisation vary between left- and right-leaning newspapers; (2) is there a difference between news and opinion articles in terms of EU salience and tone; (3) what dimensions of EU debates are more prevalent in the media. Our analysis shows that, after the crisis, the countries’ politicisation of the EU diverged more in terms of content than magnitude. However, when we only consider opinion articles, the differences within mainstream media, from the left and right, become more salient. These results confirm the role and importance of the media for EU politicisation and its potential impact on national politics.

Introduction

The traditional media play an undoubtedly important role in the process of politicisation of the European Union. They remain, first and foremost, societies’ most important source of political information and the main link between institutional and public arenas. This role is particularly important in the context of the European integration project since the main political institutions and actors of the EU, compared to the national ones, are more distant from the citizens. Therefore, a thorough study of EU politicisation in the media, combined with the analysis of the parliamentary debates conducted in the third chapter of this book, are crucial steps to understand how the EU politicisation shapes the EU issue voting in national elections, which is the core research question of this book.

Studies have shown, by analysing political actors’ statements in media, that the EU politicisation is a punctuated phenomenon, varying across countries and regions. Moreover, when it comes to the overall media coverage, Silva et al. (2022) demonstrated that the Eurozone crisis not only increased the levels of EU politicisation in the bailout countries but it also led to a higher awareness, or salience, of the different institutions of the EU. These existing studies on the magnitude of politicisation, however, do not consider important differences within the media and in the dimensions of the EU that can be the object of contestation. By looking at the media coverage of the six MAPLE countries,¹ that experienced the Eurozone crisis in different ways and to different degrees, this chapter investigates two important and untapped dimensions of the news coverage of the European integration topic that can shape voting behaviour.

The first dimension concerns the role of mainstream media as agents of EU politicisation. In this chapter, we explore whether the ideological leaning of mainstream press (left vs. right) or the type of newspaper items (news vs. opinion articles) have an impact on the salience and tone of the news coverage of the EU. We are particularly interested in investigating whether the Eurozone crisis was associated with higher convergence, or divergence, in the news coverage of the EU, within each country. The second dimension concerns the longitudinal changes in the way that the EU is reported, or debated, in the media. This chapter goes beyond the magnitude of EU politicisation to also investigate which EU dimensions (membership, constitutional structure, EU policies or domesticated policies) were more salient in the media.

The politicisation of the EU is analysed, in this chapter, using a unique dataset of 165,341 newspaper articles, from 12 quality newspapers, collected for 29 legislative elections that occurred between 2002 and 2017. We analyse the data using an innovative approach, combining manual and automated content analysis, which takes advantage of the strengths of both methods. On the one hand, the automated approach maximises the reliability and comparability of the results across time, newspapers, type of article and countries. On the other hand, the manual coding allows us to offer a more detailed, and differentiated, analysis of EU politicisation that is missing in the literature, in a longitudinal comparative perspective.

Our results indeed confirm that even though the crisis comparably increased, in terms of magnitude, the politicisation of the EU in the bailout countries, that politicisation differed significantly in their nature. Moreover, they found that the similarities between left and right newspapers, in their coverage of the EU, decrease significantly when we only look at opinion articles. This important finding tells us that the role of the media, in shaping EU voting, is not limited to their strict coverage of the electoral campaigns.

The remaining of this chapter is structured in four sections. The next section offers a brief review of the literature focusing on the politicisation of the EU. It discusses how the magnitude of EU politicisation has been assessed in the media and what are the important aspects of that concept that remain unexplored in a comparative perspective. The section after that explains the data and methods used to analyse this phenomenon. The third section presents and discusses the results and main findings of our analysis. Finally, in the last section, we summarise our main findings and discuss their contribution to this book’s objective and research question.

Literature Review

The concept of politicisation, or the politicisation hypothesis, originally referred to the anticipated expansion of actors interested in the regional integration process. According to Schmitter (1969), the European integration should become, with the gradual deepening of its process, a far more salient and contested dimension within its member-states. More recently, this concept has been divided into three core dimensions regarding EU debates: salience, polarization, and actors’ expansion (de Wilde et al., 2016, p. 4). The politicisation of the EU can therefore be understood as ‘an increase in polarisation of opinions, interests or values and the extent to which they are publicly advanced towards the process of policy formulation within the EU’ (de Wilde, 2011, p. 560).

The importance and interest in this concept increased considerably after the claim, by Hooghe and Marks (2009), that changes in the level of European integration, resulting from the Maastricht treaty, finally shifted public opinion, from a ‘permissive consensus’, to a ‘constraining dissensus’ towards the EU. This premise suggested that the creation of the ‘European Union’ increased the salience and polarisation of the regional integration topic, making it, for the first time, an important and divisive dimension in national politics. Since then, several studies have tested that claim and measured, over time, the magnitude of EU politicisation in different EU countries (Grande & Hutter, 2016; Höeglinger, 2016; Hutter & Grande, 2014; Hutter & Kriesi, 2019).

Despite some inconclusive, or even contradictory, results (e.g., Grande & Hutter, 2016, p. 87; Green-Pedersen, 2012; Höeglinger, 2016, p. 146; Statham & Trenz, 2013), the most exhaustive comparative studies suggest that, rather than being a linear phenomenon, or similarly shared across all EU member-states, EU politicisation has been a punctuated phenomenon with clearly identifiable drivers (e.g., EU treaties or crisis) and circumscribed to certain geographical regions of Europe (Hutter & Kriesi, 2019). In this regard, the 2009 Eurozone/financial crisis was a key event, bolstering considerably the salience and contestation of the EU in south European countries, particularly in Portugal and Greece (Hutter & Kriesi, 2019). However, most of these studies on EU politicisation rely on the media only as a source of data for measuring the direction and amount of political actors’ statements concerning the EU.

There are very few comparative assessments of EU politicisation, across countries and across time, that investigate the media as a primary source, or arena, of politicisation. Nevertheless, we do know that the traditional media have the capacity, or mechanisms, to influence and shape citizens’ perceptions and attitudes towards politics (Weaver, 2007). Moreover, certain media characteristics seem to influence the visibility of certain topics. In terms of both volume and content, aspects such as media ownership, media type and newspaper style can determine how the EU is portrayed in the news coverage of certain political events (Nord & Strömbäck, 2006; Peter & de Vreese, 2004; Pfetsch, 1996). More concretely, the EU, often perceived as a more complex/technical topic (Kevin, 2003; Statham, 2007), has higher visibility in the mainstream press and public broadcasting news, in comparison to commercial television and tabloid newspapers (de Vreese et al., 2006).

Despite those observed differences, the coverage of EU in the media, particularly outside major EU events, has been scarce in volume (Peter & de Vreese, 2004; Pfetsch, 1996) and predominantly neutral in tone (de Vreese, 2003; Norris, 2000). Differently than most of those studies, that look at the news coverage of the EU during major EU events, this chapter focuses, instead, on national election periods, which are more ‘demanding’ settings for EU to ‘matter’. However, in line with the goal of the book, the focus on legislative elections allows us to access the magnitude of politicisation in periods when it is likelier to impact national politics or being advanced towards policy formulation.

Overall, the existing assessments of EU politicisation on traditional media, either as a data source or as an actor, have predominantly focused on two dimensions: salience and contestation. The exploration of a multifaceted contestation of the EU (Braun et al., 2019) has been largely absent from longitudinal and comparative assessments of EU politicisation. However, according to the literature, not only there are important distinctions in how European integration has been, or could be, contested, but those differences can also have considerably different implications.

When it comes to the differentiation of EU politicisation, an extremely influential contribution was made by Peter Mair (2004, 2007), which identified two distinct dimensions of conflict about the EU. The first one, a Europeanisation dimension, dealt with the creation, consolidation and the geographical reach of the EU institutions. The other one, to some extent connected with the first, related to the conflict concerning the penetration, or reach, of EU legislation into domestic spheres. Building on this differentiation, de Wilde (2011) identified three groups, or dimensions, of EU politicisation: institutions, decision-making processes and the politicisation of issues. Finally, Hurrelmann et al. (2015) also contribute to this discussion by distinguishing policies emanated from EU and domesticated policies, which are the policies emanated from national institutions, as a consequence of EU membership. This distinction, between European and domesticated policies, is particularly important in the context of the Eurozone crisis, where domesticated policies likely became more salient.

Overall, despite its importance and theoretical development, this differentiation of politicisation remains largely untapped in comparative, longitudinal, studies of EU politicisation. Moreover, the different types of EU politicisation seem to entail different implications. More concretely, there is the perception that conflict directed to the ‘constitutive’ issues (i.e., Europeanisation, institutions or membership dimension), compared to the politicisation of European policies, have a more negative impact on the European public sphere (Risse, 2010). It is fair to assume that the differentiation in the debate/contestation of EU may lead to either a deepening of Euroscepticism, or further Europeanisation.

A differentiation of EU politicisation has been observed in the news coverage of the EU. Dutceac Segesten and Bossetta (2019) found that ‘euroscepticism’ or ‘eurosceptic’ media articles are predominantly framed in a European context, while in the UK, differently, they are primarily framed in a domestic context. More recently, Silva et al. (2022) show that the salience of different EU institutions, in the media, has shifted overtime. This chapter contributes to this topic by exploring, in addition to the salience and contestation of the EU in the media, what type of EU dimensions were discussed. We focus our analysis on the period before, during and after the Eurozone crisis. While we know, from the literature, that the crisis bolstered the politicisation of the EU, it remains unknown whether this crisis also changed the salience of the different dimensions of EU politicisation.

Research Questions, Data and Methods

This chapter offers a detailed and original analysis of EU politicisation in the mainstream media of the six MAPLE countries, from 2002 until 2017. This assessment is an essential step to understand the impact of EU politicisation on EU issue voting, which is the primary goal of this book. Moreover, this chapter answers in itself three main research questions: Can we observe differences between mainstream (left and right) newspapers when it comes to EU politicisation? Is there a difference between news articles and opinion articles? What dimensions of EU politicisation have been more discussed in the press? By answering those questions, this chapter makes two important contributions to the study of EU politicisation.

The first contribution concerns the role of media, as an actor itself, in the process of politicisation. Different from the existing studies, which mainly use mainstream media as a source of political actors’ statements, this chapter examines how mainstream media diverge in their politicisation of the EU. The second contribution is about the media content. While most of the existing longitudinal and comparative assessments of the magnitude of EU politicisation have focused on the overall levels of salience and conflict, we know that the multidimensionality of the news coverage of the EU has been increasing over time (Silva et al., 2022). Building on this perspective, we analyse EU politicisation in a more nuanced way and investigate which of its dimensions is more debated in the media. This differentiation might have, as we discussed, different implications for the European integration and EU issue voting.

Based on the existing literature, considering the extensive period that we analyse, we can bring forward two expectations regarding the salience of the different EU dimensions. The first one is that, due to the austerity measures imposed in some countries, the debates about domesticated policies became considerably more salient, after the Eurozone crisis, in the group of bailout countries. The second expectation is that membership debates became more prominent, after that crisis, in all countries. The reasoning for that is that the Eurozone crisis also gave an opportunity for Eurosceptic actors to contest the institutional foundations of the EU polity. Alternatively, a competing hypothesis is that the crisis increased the Europeanisation and, consequently, also led to more discussions regarding its dimension of penetration (i.e., policies related to the EU).

In order to answer those four questions, this chapter uses a unique dataset of newspaper articles collected from six Eurozone countries: Belgium, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. The articles were collected from 12 newspapers, two per country, during the 30 days that preceded all legislative elections that occurred between 2002 and 2017. The final dataset includes, from 29 elections, a total 165,341 newspaper items (including journalistic and opinion articles). We analyse the politicisation during electoral campaigns which are key periods when political contestation is at its most intense form and likelier to lead to policy outcomes.

We limit our analysis to the mainstream/broadsheet press, which is usually a reference to other media and a great proxy for a country’s media coverage of political events (Boomgaarden et al., 2010). Moreover, broadsheet newspapers, compared to tabloids, are much likelier to discuss the EU topic (de Vreese et al., 2006). The selection of the two newspapers, per country, followed the criteria of both being quality/broadsheet papers, having comparatively high number of readers and diverging in their ideological leaning.

An expert survey on European media systems (Popescu et al., 2011) was used to select, for each one of the six countries,² one newspaper from the left and one from the right. From the 12 selected newspapers (Appendix: Table 2.2), we extracted, from their printed versions (except when content was available in a machine-readable format³), all news and opinion articles published during the 30 days⁴ before a legislative election. The articles published in secondary sections (e.g., sports, culture or classified advertisement) were not included in the analysis. For newspapers only available in printed version, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software was used to manually extract the articles’ titles and main text. In those cases, additional steps were taken to assure the quality of the final dataset.⁵ During the extraction process, relevant information about the article such as section name and page number was also collected.

Concerning the methods used, our analysis was made in two steps that combined automated and manual content-analysis techniques. While, in the first stage, automated methods were used to access the salience and contestation of the EU dimension, in the second stage, the main EU dimension present in the articles was identified by a team of trained coders. This multi-method approach allowed us to not only maximise the comparability of our results but also move beyond that and offer a more detailed, and diversified, picture of how the EU dimension has been discussed in media.

For the first stage of the analysis, we adopt a multidimensional concept of politicisation focused on two main attributes of the news coverage of a topic: its salience and the levels of contestation surrounding it. Here, as we discussed, we depart from existing studies on the politicisation of the EU (e.g., Grande & Hutter, 2016; Hutter & Kriesi, 2019; Hutter et al., 2016), that focus on the statements of political actors covered by the media. In this sense, we offer an alternative, and more encompassing, way of assessing EU politicisation that takes into account a more diversified set of actors represented in the mass media. We therefore follow in the tradition of Pfetsch et al. (2008) that perceives the media itself as an important political actor, and a non-neutral debate setting (Wilde & Lord, 2016), that is able to (re)shape the debates surrounding the European integration process. Consequently, our analysis pays special attention to the contrasts between newspapers and types of newspaper items.

Similar to Schmidtke (2016), we operationalise EU salience as the percentage of articles, out of all articles in a particular election/newspaper, that is about the EU. The articles about the EU were identified using an extensive list of EU-related terms (Appendix: Table 2.3). This list, translated into seven languages, was adapted from the codebook of Maier et al. (2014). When a newspaper article included one EU-related term in the title or more than one in the remaining text, the article was coded as being about the EU. Overall, 13.8% (22,769) of articles in our dataset mentioned the EU and 7.7% (12,716) were coded as being about the EU. The minimum value of EU salience was 2.8% and the maximum was 19.6%. The average value of EU salience in our dataset was 7.96%.

The dimension of contestation was examined by looking at the proportion of articles, in a year/newspaper, with a negative tone towards the EU. The articles’ tone was measured using sentiment analysis. The sentiment analysis is a well-developed automated text-analysis technique that extracts the valence/tone of a text by means of natural language processing (Pang & Lee, 2008). It has become a widely used method in political communication studies and is used to examine a diversified array of media effects/mechanisms such as agenda-setting (Ceron et al., 2016), media framing (Burscher et al., 2014), conflict (Proksch et al., 2019) and, as in the case of this chapter, also the media tone (Soroka et al., 2015; Young & Soroka, 2012).

Since our dataset includes articles written in seven different languages, we translated all articles into a single ‘pivot’ language (Lucas et al., 2015). This approach, of applying existing methods designed for English in the translated corpus, rather than translating the lexicons into each language of the articles, has been shown to yield the best results (Araújo et al., 2016). Furthermore, this allowed us to use more sophisticated/valid sentiment measures that use valence shifters,⁶ which also gives us higher confidence for our measurements of tone.

The tone of each article mentioning the EU was therefore calculated in the following way. We first translated to English all sentences with an EU-related term.⁷ The translations were done using the R package ‘googleLanguageR’, which accesses the Google’s translation API service. Using the sentiment algorithm provided in ‘sentimentr’⁸ (Rinker, 2019), we calculated two sentiment variables for each article. The first one was the mean value of the sentiment scores for each sentence mentioning the EU in the body of the articles. The second variable corresponded to the sentiment score of the titles that mentioned the EU. Finally, the mean of those two scores was used as the overall tone towards the EU of each article.

Based on the signal of the final sentiment score, each article was then coded as being either positive or negative towards the EU. We did so because the direction of the sentiment scores (i.e., being negative/positive towards the EU) is a far more objective and meaningful factor than the variation of its degree (i.e., how negative/positive is the article towards the EU). Ultimately, our contestation measure is the ratio between negative and positive articles towards the EU.

Our contestation measure relies on the assumption that contestation towards the EU increases when the proportion of negative articles towards the EU, in a particular newspaper and year, also increases. This assumption is valid if the proportion/percentage of positive articles is usually higher, and the percentage of negative articles does not exceed considerably the 50 per cent threshold.⁹ This was indeed confirmed in the data, where the percentage of negative articles has a mean of 41%, a minimum of 25.3% and a maximum value of 50.3%. Furthermore, our contestation measure is more accurate/meaningful if there is a low proportion of ‘neutral’ EU articles. This fact was also confirmed with the data, where only 6.6% of the EU articles had neutral valence.

The second step of our analysis concerned the different EU dimensions salient in the media. Those dimensions were manually coded by a team of trained coders that identified, for each article about the EU, if the EU article was mainly about (1) membership, (2) constitutional structure, (3) EU policies or (4) domesticated policies.¹⁰ The first category concerns debates surrounding EU membership (e.g., statements questioning whether a country should be a member of the EU, its costs and benefits, debates surrounding the geographical reach of the EU). The second category, constitutional structure, concerns the politicisation of the decision-making process and debates surrounding the procedures and responsibilities of the different institutions. The EU policies category deals with policies emanated from, or in the agenda of, the EU’s legislative, executive and judiciary institutions. Finally, domesticated policies refer to the debate of policies,¹¹ originated from national institutions, that result from the EU membership (e.g., cuts mandated by budgetary requirements of the Eurozone). This distinction between EU and domesticated policies, which is the main departure from the typology of de Wilde (2011), is particularly important in the context of the Eurozone crisis and, consequently, to the analysis made in this chapter.

Finally, to increase the comparability of the results across newspapers and over time, the coders involved in the coding process analysed a randomised set of articles from all years and different newspapers. This process, made possible by having the data in a machine-readable format, further allows us to avoid a coder bias in our results and maximise the comparability within the countries.

Results

The first aspect analysed in this chapter is the level of EU salience and contestation in the news media coverage before legislative elections. Similar to previous assessments of the magnitude of EU politicisation, looking at the overall trends of the two dimensions over time, our results also confirm that the Eurozone crisis of 2009 bolstered the salience and contestation of the EU (Fig. 2.1). This increase is evident in the group of bailout countries, particularly in Greece and Portugal, cases where the salience of the EU doubled in the ‘critical’ elections.¹² In the case of the creditor countries (Belgium and Germany), the increase of EU salience in the media seems to be gradual, less steep and not necessarily related to that crisis.

Fig. 2.1

Salience (lines) and Contestation towards the EU in the news coverage of legislative elections in two mainstream newspapers

When it comes to contestation, it is also evident, in the bailout group,¹³ that the proportion of articles with a negative tone towards the EU saw an increase after 2009. In the case of Greece, the EU was contested the most in the 2012¹⁴ election, becoming gradually less contested in the two-following elections. Differently, in the case of Ireland and Portugal, the proportion of negative EU articles has been increasing since 2009, having their highest values in the last elections analysed. The case of Spain is somehow different. While the salience and contestation increased in the first election after the crisis (2011), these two elements decreased considerably in the following election, in 2015, to increase again in the election held in the following year. These results suggest that the EU was, somewhat, depoliticised in the 2015 Spanish election.

Regarding the levels of EU contestation, we can identify some differences between the two creditor countries. In the case of Germany, the proportion of negative EU articles has been relatively stable and comparatively low in all elections. Differently, the Belgium case shows in the 2010 election, right after the eurozone crisis, an increase in terms of both EU salience and contestation. These increases observed for Belgium, however, especially in salience, are not as steep as the ones observed in Greece, Portugal and Spain.

Regarding differences between media, our results suggest a strong parallelism between the left and the right-wing mainstream newspapers in their politicisation of the EU. This is evident in Fig. 2.1, with the newspapers exhibiting similar diachronic patterns in all six countries. This idea is further confirmed, as we can see in Table 2.1, with a strong positive correlation between the pairs of newspapers, both in terms of EU salience (0.739) and in terms of contestation (0.629). The ideological leaning does not seem, even after the eurozone crisis, an important factor for the changes in EU politicisation. Furthermore, the data also shows a moderate and positive correlation between EU salience and EU contestation. These results go in line with the idea that news media attribute news-value to conflict, suggesting that the observed increase in EU salience resulted from its increasing contestation. Albeit not completely straightforward, our results, particularly in the cases of Greece, Portugal and Spain, indeed suggest that an increase in contestation preceded the increase in salience.

Table 2.1 Pearson’s correlation results between different groups/variables for different types of articles

The second question investigated concerns the difference between types of articles (news articles vs. opinion articles) in the politicisation of the EU. The results, in Fig. 2.2, show that, when it comes to salience, the EU has been, in general, more salient in the opinion articles. Moreover, in most countries, the Eurozone crisis seems to have increased those differences. In the case of Ireland, the clearest example, the Eurozone crisis seemingly led to the politicisation of the EU exclusively in the opinion items of the mainstream press. A clear difference of EU salience between types of articles is also observed in Greece, Portugal and Belgium. Contrarily, in the case of Spain, when it comes to the salience of the EU, we cannot observe any noticeable difference between the two types of newspaper items.

Fig. 2.2

Salience (lines) and Contestation towards the EU in the news coverage of legislative elections, a comparison between news and opinion articles

When it comes to EU contestation, we also observe some differences and patterns, between the two types of articles. In general, with the exception of Belgium, in the majority of the elections analysed, the proportion of negative articles has been higher in the opinion items. Moreover, in the bailout countries, the results show that the contestation towards the EU after the crisis was also more prominent in the opinion articles, in comparison with the traditional news pieces, with the only exception to this pattern being, again, the Spanish election of 2015.

Overall, the results show that, in general, the salience and contestation towards the EU have been higher in opinion articles, in comparison to journalistic news pieces. Moreover, the correlation between newspapers, when it comes to both EU salience and contestation, becomes the weakest when we only consider opinion pieces (Table 2.1). These results suggest that the journalistic coverage has been truthful to the salience of the EU during legislative campaigns, with the mainstream media being, therefore, good sources to assess the magnitude of politicisation during electoral campaigns. However, if we consider the media as a political actor capable of (re)shaping politicisation, one cannot ignore the opinion pieces. We find that not only opinion articles are likelier to politicise the EU, but they also increase the differences in mainstream media, particularly in terms of EU tone.

Indeed, as Fig. 2.3 shows us, the divergence between mainstream press increases considerably when we only look at opinion articles. While the differences between newspapers are more prominent in the tone, we can highlight two findings concerning the dimension of salience. The first one is that, during the German elections of 2005, 2009 and 2013, the EU topic was practically absent from the opinion pieces published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Interestingly, in the other two elections, the salience of the EU was identical in the opinion articles of the two German newspapers. The second interesting result is that, in the case of Belgium, Greece, Portugal and Spain, the two mainstream newspapers diverged considerably in their first election after the Eurozone crisis, a pattern that, when we considered both opinion and news pieces, was either not as evident or, in the case of Belgium, not even present. Moreover, in Greece, Portugal and Spain, it was the left-leaning newspapers that gave considerably higher salience to the EU in their opinion pieces.

Fig. 2.3

Only for opinion articles: Salience (lines) and Contestation towards the EU in the news coverage of legislative elections in two different mainstream newspapers

When it comes to EU contestation, not only the divergence is higher between mainstream press but it is also a lot more difficult to identify consistent patterns in the data. Differently from the salience dimension, there isn’t a single case where, for all elections, the EU contestation was consistently higher in one of the newspapers’ opinion items. However, it is in Spain that we can see the clearest and most consistent divergence between left- and right-leaning newspapers. With the exception of the first election, where both newspapers had prevalently positive tone towards the EU, the situation shifted considerably and El Mundo, closer to the right, became considerably more negative towards the EU in its option pieces. In the case of Portugal, the Eurozone crisis seems to have also shifted the tone of the two main broadsheet newspapers, with the Diário de Notícias, closer to the right, becoming the newspaper with a higher proportion of opinion articles that were negative towards the EU.

The last question explored in this chapter concerns the different dimensions of EU politicisation that have been salient in the media (Fig. 2.4). Regarding this aspect, we can observe differences between the two groups of countries (bailout and creditor) and between pre and post bailout periods. With the exception of Spain, before the Eurozone crisis, the most salient dimension of the EU politicisation was the EU policies’ dimension. Furthermore, the way the EU was politicised in Belgium, Germany and Ireland has been very similar, with a much higher visibility of debates on EU policies (on average higher than 60%) and a relatively low salience of the remaining dimensions. Differently, in Greece and Portugal, besides EU policies, there was before the crisis, to a certain extent, also some prominence of domesticated issues in the news coverage of legislative elections. Finally, Spain differed considerably from the other countries in the pre-crisis period. More concretely, the domesticated issues have been the most prevalent dimension of EU politicisation discussed in media. Overall, these results show that, in the pre-crisis period, despite the relatively low salience of the EU in all countries, there were considerable differences in the way that EU was politicised in media. More concretely, the domesticated policies, which refer to the domestic policy implications of being an EU member, were always a more salient concern in the South, particularly in Spain.

Fig. 2.4

Salience of different EU dimensions during legislative elections’ periods (year/election values are the average of the two newspapers)

Regarding how the crisis, and subsequent bailouts, might have affected the way that EU was politicised, we can, to some extent, confirm our first expectation. More concretely, the results denote an increase in the salience of domesticated policies immediately after the Eurozone crisis in Ireland, Portugal and Spain. The increase is particularly evident in the case of Portugal where, in 2011, about 70% of the articles about the EU dealt with domesticated policy aspects. Contrarily, Greece was the only bailout country where the salience of domesticated policies decreased in their first critical election post-bailout, in 2012. Instead, in Greek media, the EU became more politicised in terms of membership (constitutive) issues. Very interesting, our analysis shows that the way the EU was politicised in Greece after the bailout was very different from what happened in Ireland, Portugal and Spain, where membership aspects were never at the forefront of the debate.

Our second expectation anticipated a higher salience of the membership dimension after the Eurozone crisis. The data, however, did not confirm this hypothesis. Overall, the EU membership aspect has never been very salient in the media, a situation that the Eurozone crisis also did not change. Greece seems to be the exception to that trend. In this country, the proportion of debates about EU membership saw a sharp increase in the post-bailout election of 2012. Despite the increase in the magnitude of EU politicisation, with the exception of Greece, the crisis did not contribute, in the bailout countries, to a higher contestation of the institutional foundations of the EU polity. Instead, the debate remained, with some changes in ‘framing’ (i.e., European versus domesticated), in the realm of policies. Contrarily, we also did not find evidence that this crisis led to more Europeanisation, in the form of a higher discussion of policies. The discussion of policies, either EU or domesticated, was already a predominant dimension before the crisis.

Finally, it is also interesting to notice a similar pattern in the last three elections analysed (Spain and Ireland 2016 and Germany 2017). These three elections show, in their results, a steep increase in the salience of the membership dimension. The refugee’s crisis might have contributed to this increased salience of EU constitutive aspects, as well as Brexit. In this sense, it would be very interesting, in the future, to see whether other countries observed similar patterns and whether this change has persisted over time. This change of focus from ‘EU penetration’ to ‘EU institutionalisation’ can have, as theory suggests, and as it is discussed in the introductory chapter of this book, important implications for both the European integration process and the accountability of national political systems. While, on the one hand, our results somehow confirmed, as Bartolini (2005, p. 349) suggested, the parties’ lack of capacity to debate the constitutive issues of the newly created political community, on the other hand, that inability seems to have waned considerably in the last national elections, after the refugee crisis and Brexit.

Conclusion

This chapter analysed the overtime politicisation of the EU in the mainstream press of six eurozone countries (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain). Using automated text analysis, we were able to clearly show that the Eurozone crisis was associated with an increase in EU salience and contestation in the news coverage of legislative elections in the group of bailout countries. These results go in line with previous studies that found that the Eurozone crisis increased the politicisation of the EU in the south of Europe (Hutter & Kriesi, 2019).

Our results also showed a positive and significant correlation between salience and contestation, which has two important implications for the future study of this topic. The first one is that, in the case of media, salience can be a satisfactory indicator of politicisation. This is relevant since measuring salience is far easier than contestation, therefore opening the door, in the future, to even more encompassing studies of the magnitude of EU politicisation, which is crucial for better understanding its national and regional implications. The second one is that the recurrent calls for a higher EU visibility in media, as a crucial step to deepen the European integration, might not be as straightforward. In line with what Boomgaarden et al. (2010, p. 518) also found, when it comes to the EU, more news is not necessarily ‘good news’. The implications of increasing visibility and negativity are not yet clear. While negative evaluations could indeed reduce public support and trust, a higher salience of the EU topic can promote more engaging debates and increase the public’s interest and involvement in the European integration process.

We also found differences between news and opinion articles, when it comes to the magnitude of EU politicisation. More concretely, the salience and contestation of the EU have been, in general, higher in the opinion articles with the crisis accentuating those differences. Furthermore, our analysis also shows that, in terms of EU salience and contestation, the differences between newspapers become more noticeable when we consider only opinion articles, in comparison to more traditional journalistic pieces. This suggests that journalistic/editorial norms contribute to a certain standardisation of the extent to which the EU is politicised in the media, or that the strict news coverage made by mainstream newspapers depicts very accurately the overall levels of EU politicisation in a certain country.

Our analysis shows that it is essential to consider opinion items, not only in attempts to explore differences within mainstream media in the politicisation of the EU, but also to better understand the role played by the media in (re)shaping that politicisation. In cases like Portugal and Spain, we observed interesting patterns in the politicisation of the EU in opinion pieces. For instance, the newspaper with higher EU salience is also the one showing lower levels of EU contestation. Moreover, after the eurozone crisis, it was the right-leaning newspapers that became the most negative towards the EU. It is important to stress that these differences were observed in mainstream newspaper that are very close to the centre of the ideological spectrum. To put in other words, the differences in the politicisation of the EU should be higher when comparing more ideologically distant media outlets.

In this chapter, we went beyond the magnitude of EU politicisation to focus on how differentiated that politicisation has been in the traditional news coverage of legislative elections. Our results show that relying exclusively on the magnitude of politicisation offers an extremely incomplete picture of how the traditional media politicised the EU before and after the eurozone crisis. In fact, the politicisation of the EU, after the crisis, varied considerably within the group of bailout countries analysed in this book. In Spain, domesticated policies have always been the most salient dimension in articles about the EU. In Portugal, that dimension only became the most salient aspect in the elections after the Portuguese bailout. In the case of Ireland, in all of the four elections analysed, the EU was primarily debated in terms of EU policies, even though this trend was finally challenged, in the last election of 2016, by the membership dimension. Finally, in the Greek case, we found that the crisis changed considerably the way in which the EU was politicised in mainstream media, with membership becoming for the first time, in the critical election of 2012, the most frequently debated dimension.

Overall, our analysis highlighted substantive differences within the group of debtor countries that can be important to make sense of the seemingly different implications, or effects, that the politicisation of the EU might have on EU issue voting, which is the central aspect of this book. Indeed, the study of the implications of EU politicisation should consider not only how much but also in which ways has the EU been politicised in each country. As Baglioni and Hurrelmann (2016) suggest, part of the difficulties to understand the implications of EU politicisation might arise from an undifferentiated treatment of that phenomenon.

While this chapter focused on the media, the role of different political actors is an equally important dimension in the study of EU politicisation. The next chapter focuses on the institutional arena to analyse how the EU has been (de)politicised by the different parties during parliamentary debates. Using a unique dataset of parliamentary speeches, the next chapter analyses how the main political parties have debated the EU before and after the eurozone crisis. Moreover, it also explores, at the party level, what are the main determinants of EU politicisation in the parliamentary debates of the six MAPLE countries.

Appendix

See Tables 2.2 and 2.3.

Table 2.2 List of elections, newspapers, observation periods and the number of articles analysed

Table 2.3 List of the expressions used to identify EU articles