Social media play an increasingly important part in the communication strategies of political campaigns by reflecting information about the policy preferences and opinions of political actors and ...their public followers. In addition, the content of the messages provides rich information about the political issues and the framing of those issues during elections, such as whether contested issues concern Europe or rather extend pre-existing national debates. In this study, we survey the European landscape of social media using tweets originating from and referring to political actors during the 2014 European Parliament election campaign. We describe the language and national distribution of the messages, the relative volume of different types of communications, and the factors that determine the adoption and use of social media by the candidates. We also analyze the dynamics of the volume and content of the communications over the duration of the campaign with reference to both the EU integration dimension of the debate and the prominence of the most visible list-leading candidates. Our findings indicate that the lead candidates and their televised debate had a prominent influence on the volume and content of communications, and that the content and emotional tone of communications more reflects preferences along the EU dimension of political contestation rather than classic national issues relating to left-right differences.
This article investigates how the systemic politicization of the EU is associated with support for different political parties. We argue that, while politicization involves actions by both ...Eurosceptic and Europhile parties, it does not affect parties at both extremes of the continuum in the same way. To investigate these differentiated effects, we leverage data from the European Elections Study and the Chapel Hill expert survey covering two decades (1999 to 2019). The evidence supports the hypothesis that, when it comes to voters’ preferences, politicization strongly favours Eurosceptic parties. We conclude that the systemic politicization of European issues is thus a one-way street leading to the reinforcement of the constraining dissensus on the EU.
Over the past decade, the wave of successive crises that hit the EU has tested the EU's legitimacy and resulted in increased EU politicisation. In the period between the Brexit referendum up until ...the 2019 European elections, several CEE member states (such as Poland and Hungary and to a lesser extent Romania) contested the EU for breaching their national sovereignty, claiming that their countries' values and identities are 'threatened' by the EU's interference. In this article, we analyse the case of Romania's clashes with the European Commission between 2017 and 2019 on the topic of rule of law backsliding. We analyse these discursive clashes in connection to the country's first Presidency of the Council, as an illustration of the increased politicisation placed in the overall context of the Future of Europe debates. The empirical part is based on a chronological account of selected qualitative data about how this national-supranational 'power struggle' unfolded in the studied period. The findings show that in the case of Romania two forms of politicisation coincided and collided - one that was 'bottom-up', marked by highly polarised national politics and an East-West division and another that was 'top-down' - defined by the tensions inside EU's own political dynamics between the Council and the Commission.
Research has demonstrated how the European Parliament has expanded its powers vis-à-vis other EU institutions by strategically exploiting powers it already holds and appealing to its contribution to ...democratic legitimacy. However, established theories are challenged by the failure of the EP to secure the election of a so-called Spitzenkandidat to the post of European Commission President in 2019. Was this failure an incidental set-back or does it point to a structural limit to the EP's ability to expand its powers? Exploring the latter option, this article proposes that the 2019 events warrant the revision of the EP-centred parliamentarisation thesis that dominates our understanding of EU inter-institutional politics. Instead, it develops an alternative theory that departs from the conception of the EU as a demoi-cracy. Using the events in 2014 and 2019, the article constructs analytical narratives for both theoretical positions. Reading the 2019 case through the demoi-cratic perspective suggests that national leaders are unlikely to allow the EP to reclaim the Spitzenkandidaten-process. More generally, it follows from this perspective that the EP can only successfully get the member states to share powers, not to cede them.
According to conventional wisdom, the traditional gender gap in voting has disappeared or even reversed in most established democracies. Drawing on the existing literature on differences between the ...sexes in political engagement and on pioneering voter turnout theories, this article questions the conventional assumption and hypothesises that women still participate at a lower rate in less important elections. It systematically tests this hypothesis by exploring the impact of gender on voter turnout in different electoral arenas. The empirical analyses of two cross-national datasets (Making Electoral Democracy Work and the European Election Study) demonstrate that although there is generally no gender gap in first-order elections, women tend to vote less than men in second-order contests. This reflects lower levels of interest in politics among women and their lower levels of knowledge about politics when it comes to second-order elections.
This article investigates whether public preferences for European solidarity are associated with vote choices in the 2019 European elections. After multiple crises, the politicisation of European ...Union affairs has increased, polarising voters and parties between those favouring the redistribution of risks across member states and those prioritising national responsibility in coping with the consequences of the crises. We expect pro-solidarity voters to be more prone to vote for green and radical-left parties and less prone to vote for conservative and radical-right parties. Testing these hypotheses in 10 European Union countries with original survey data, we find that green and radical-left parties profited from European solidarity voting only in some countries, while being pro-solidarity reduced the likelihood of voting for both moderate and radical-right parties in each sample country.
This special issue focuses on the consequences of the heightened conflict between member states and increased politicization of European affairs for electoral politics in the European Union. In this ...introduction we begin by outlining three important developments that fuelled the politicization: (a) the common currency; (b) the increased pushback on the EU’s open border policies; and (c) the inability of the EU to prevent democratic backsliding in some countries. We then discuss their consequences for EU elections, particularly campaigns, public opinion on Europe and voter behaviour, which are investigated against the backdrop of the 2019 European Parliament elections in the individual articles in this special issue. This introduction provides a contextual framework for these contributions and reflects upon some of its main findings.
A new wave of extreme right-wing political parties entered the European political scene both on the national levels and the European supra-governmental level sparking fears about the rule of law ...among investors and policymakers. The European Parliament’s elections scheduled for June 2024 are seen as a crucial turning point in the continent's political landscape. Using a mix of OLS regressions and event study, this paper analyzed how stock markets and bond markets reacted to European elections. The results show that the incumbent government's fiscal record appears to influence its re-election chances in developing countries and markets price weak fiscal balances around elections. The paper assessed how government bond markets reacted to the EP’s elections rounds of 2014 and 2019. These rounds of elections have been dominated by the political parties with cantered-orientated ideologies which may not be the case for the next round of elections in 2024. The results show how EP’s elections stabilized bond markets, especially in countries with weak macroeconomic fundamentals. The results emphasize the intricate relationship between fiscal policies, political events, and financial market behaviour. Investors, policymakers, and governments should consider these findings when assessing electoral and market dynamics, particularly in the context of the upcoming 2024 European Parliament elections.
Relating to theories of dissonant public spheres and affective publics, we study negativity, dramatization, and populist content in political party Facebook posts across 12 countries during the 2014 ...and 2019 European Parliament Election campaigns. A quantitative content analysis of 14,293 posts from 111 (2014) and 116 (2019) political parties shows that negative emotion, negative campaigning, dramatization, and populist content has increased over this time. We show that political parties sought to evoke more negative emotions and generate more dramatization, engaged more in negative campaigning, and included more populist content in their Facebook posts in the 2019 EP election than in 2014. Further, we show that posts evoking negative emotions and dramatization and involving negative campaigning yield higher user engagement than other posts, while populist content also led to more user reactions in 2014, but not in 2019. Negative, exaggerated, and sensationalized messaging therefore makes sense from a strategic perspective, because the increased frequencies of likes, shares, and comments make parties' messages travel farther and deeper in social networks, thereby reaching a wider audience. It seems that the rise in affective and dissonant communication has not emerged unintentionally, but is also a result of strategic campaigning.
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