Conceptualising politicisation as activity: the politics of the 2019 EP elections

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article makes an innovative contribution to concept formation in the study of politicisation. It proposes a novel approach to analysing politicisation and applies it to the EU: It develops a theoretical and conceptual framework that regards politics as an activity and politicisation as the action that marks an issue as political. It is argued that such an approach can grasp facets of politicisation that most other existing approaches do not manage to tackle, since they rely on a system-based concept of politics, which leads to blind spots in their analytical outreach. Based on a discussion of classical and contemporary literature on politics and politicisation, a taxonomy of four scenarios of EU politicisation and its impact on EU citizen involvement and EU integration is then developed. The final part of the article illustrates these scenarios with Eurobarometer data that highlight that the 2019 EP elections were marked by complex and partially opposing dynamics of politicisation: voter preferences and outcomes indicate an increased impact of EU-related claims alongside growing generalised polity contestation. Power constellations in the EP have changed, but the 2019 EP elections also had a clear impact on the formation of political leadership in the EU.