Abstract
The paper explores newspapers’ portrayals of the European Parliament and national parliaments (NPs) in European Union (EU) affairs. To understand underlying perceptions of journalists, it takes public parliamentary activities and looks at their influence on parliaments’ news visibility in Finland, Germany and the UK in routine periods in 2011 and 2012. This is done against the background that parliaments, regarded as ultimate legitimisers of state power, depend on the mass media to reach their citizenry. However, journalists follow their own agenda in publishing parliamentary news. In this regard, they may highlight the complementarity, competition or cooperation of parliaments in the EU’s unique multi-tier environment. Overall, our results suggest that NPs correspond stronger with newsmakers’ anticipation of readership interest. In addition, findings seem to support the assumption that parliaments in the EU are mostly perceived as complementary, separate legislative branches in EU decision-making.
Highlights
Parliamentary representation is still regarded the ultimate legitimiser of state power (Urbinati and Warren 2008, 390)
For a polity like the European Union (EU) which is continuously diagnosed to suffer from a severe democratic deficit (Follesdal and Hix 2006; Hooghe and Marks 2009), the link between voters and their representatives is crucial for the legitimacy of political decisions: Citizens need to know how the representatives they have directly elected make their interests count (e.g. Manin 1997)
The sample consists of articles in the three largest newspapers in Finland, Germany and the United Kingdom dealing with the European Parliament (EP) or national parliaments (NPs) in EU affairs
Summary
Parliamentary representation is still regarded the ultimate legitimiser of state power (Urbinati and Warren 2008, 390). Together with the European Parliament (EP), national parliaments (NPs) find themselves in an indeterminate field of political representation in which they co-exist influencing each other and representing overlapping constituencies without a clearly defined relationship Parliamentarians at both levels are directly elected agents of the citizens but have very different tasks in the legislative process of the EU. We will trace the general discussion on the multilevel system of parliamentary representation highlighting the complementary, competitive and co-operative nature of parliamentary interaction We assume that these patterns of interaction may underlie journalists’perceptions when evaluating parliaments as news items and formulate ideal-type hypotheses to explore effects of activities on coverage
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