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From constraining to catalysing dissensus? The impact of political contestation on parliamentary communication in EU affairs

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Abstract

National parliaments have the potential to serve as transmission belts between the European Union (EU) and their citizens. By publicly communicating EU issues, they can enhance the visibility, public accountability and ultimately the legitimacy of supranational governance. Not least since the Eurozone crisis, this task has become increasingly important in the ever more politicised context of EU integration characterised by public and partisan contestation. Against this background, the aim of the article is to investigate the communication efforts of national parliaments in EU affairs and, in particular, to analyse the impact of the levels of contestation of EU issues both within the public and the parliamentary arena on their communication activities. In a nutshell, in how far has political contestation acted as a catalyst for parliamentary communication of EU affairs? Our data on plenary activities in seven EU parliaments from 2010 to 2013 reveals that political contestation in public opinion has a positive impact, while contestation within parliament may hamper communication of EU affairs.

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Notes

  1. Unfortunately, we were unable to obtain information on the overall number of debates on all issues. We can therefore only compare the share of plenary time spent on EU debates.

  2. The data collection took place between November 2013 and September 2014.

  3. The data was retrieved through the Eurobarometer Interactive Search System, online at: ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/cf/index.cfm?lang=en.

  4. An alternative measure would have been the share of respondents who named the EU among the greatest problems facing their country in the European Election Study (De Vries, 2010a). However, given the wording of the question, this mainly measures salience in terms of negative attitudes.

  5. The Chapel Hill data is based on expert surveys; respondents were asked to assess ‘the general position on European integration that the party leadership took over the course of 2010’ on a scale from 1=strongly opposed to 7=strongly in favour. A party was considered as Eurosceptic if it had a score of 3.5 or below.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editors of this special issue as well as the anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments. In addition, many thanks go to Guido Tiemann and Peter Grand for their advice, to the coders for their support with the data collection and to the project assistants Roman Senninger and Verena Zech for their help with the data. Finally, the authors would like to thank the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) for the generous funding of the PACE research project (P25062-G16, www.ihs.ac.at/pace/). All remaining errors are the authors’.

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  1. Institute for Advanced Studies, Josefstädter Straße 39, Vienna, 1080, Austria

    Katrin Auel, Olga Eisele & Lucy Kinski

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  1. Katrin Auel
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Correspondence to Katrin Auel.

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Auel, K., Eisele, O. & Kinski, L. From constraining to catalysing dissensus? The impact of political contestation on parliamentary communication in EU affairs. Comp Eur Polit 14, 154–176 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2015.38

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