Abstract
Over the last decades, EU integration has become the subject of increased public discussion, debate, and contestation, which is explained through different lenses in EU studies by liberal intergovernmentalists and post-functionalists. This chapter is a contribution to this debate as it seeks to shed light on patterns of politicisation over EU integration in the European public spheres. Through the analysis of 16 newspapers from seven Eastern (Hungary, Poland, Romania) and Western (Belgium, France, Germany, and Spain) EU member states, this chapter analyses the EU media coverage in the context of the 2019 European elections with a focus on salience, polarisation, and lines of conflict over EU integration. Scrutinising a set of 1127 articles, the analysis captures six lines of tensions—intergovernmental conflict, national vs. supranational, government vs. opposition, supporters of democracy vs. threats to democracy, supporters of immigration vs. anti-immigration, and integration vs. disintegration—whose intensity varies not only in the Eastern and Western newspapers, but also among them. While the conflicts opposing integration vs. disintegration and democracy vs. ‘illiberalism’ are common to the Eastern and Western newspapers analysed, although framed differently, the four other lines of conflict seem to be specific to the EU coverage in the Eastern newspapers. The article is conceived as an empirical test to theoretically bridge the concept of politicisation to the EU's theories of integration and types of conflict over European integration.
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Notes
- 1.
In the months of April and May, coders were asked to consult the websites of each newspaper for the country assigned to them and select every article that was related to the EU in the broadest sense.
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Funding
The data used in this article has been collected with the support of the following research grants: Conflicts of Sovereignty in the EU funded by the Foundation Wiener Anspach (coordinated by Nathalie Brack, Ramona Coman and Amandine Crespy) and the project ValeurS (Action de recherche concertée – ULB - CEVIPOL – IEE, coordinated by François Foret, Ramona Coman and François Heinderyckx).
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Andguladze, A., Beyer, J., Coman, R., Vander Meulen, J. (2022). Patterns of Politicisation in the 2019 European Elections: Salience, Polarisation, and Conflict Over EU Integration in (Eastern/Western) Media Coverage. In: Haapala, T., Oleart, Á. (eds) Tracing the Politicisation of the EU. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82700-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82700-7_9
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