Abstract
With the lingering Euro crisis, personalized competition for the Commission presidency, and a surge of Eurosceptic parties, the 2014 European Parliament elections took place against an unknown level of European Union politicization. How does this changing context affect the supply side of party competition on European issues in EP election campaigns? This article compares the 2014 and 2009 EP elections in two EU founding members with high electoral support for radical left and radical right Euroscepticism—France and the Netherlands. We study publically visible patterns of partisan mobilization in the written news media with semi-automated content analyses. The data indicate that visible party mobilization on EU issues was on average not significantly higher in 2014. While particularly mainstream and especially incumbent parties publically mobilize on European issues during both campaigns, the radical right’s mobilization efforts have become more visible during the 2014 elections. Examining the temporal dynamics within electoral campaigns, we show that the Eurosceptic fringes exhibit significant contagion effects on the mainstream parties, but that the extent of this contagion was surprisingly lower in the 2014 campaign. As a result, the increasing EU politicization between the 2009 and 2014 electoral contests has not resulted in an enhanced and more interactive supply of partisan debate about Europe.
Highlights
Electoral accountability is key for the democratic quality of European integration
These works show that the consecutive authority transfers from member-states to the EU have made European questions more salient and contested among the wider citizenry. Has this societal politicization been met by a greater supply of political debate about Europe, and has it affected the degree to which mainstream parties react to Eurosceptic challenger parties? We approach this question by comparing the 2009 and 2014 European Parliament (EP) election campaigns
The analyses show that the degree of publically visible partisan mobilization efforts on European issues was on average not significantly higher during the 2014 EP campaign
Summary
Electoral accountability is key for the democratic quality of European integration. Yet, the powers of the European Parliament (EP) have strongly increased in recent decades (Rittberger, 2012), the corresponding election campaigns are conventionally seen as ‘secondorder’ contests, during which political competition is mainly driven by domestic issues (Reif & Schmitt, 1980). These works show that the consecutive authority transfers from member-states to the EU have made European questions more salient and contested among the wider citizenry Has this societal politicization been met by a greater supply of political debate about Europe, and has it affected the degree to which mainstream parties react to Eurosceptic challenger parties? Using semi-automated procedures we retrieved cooccurrences of party actors and keywords for European issues in a large corpus of articles published in six French and Dutch newspapers in the seven weeks preceding each EP election Based on this data we, first, study the supply of European issues by Eurosceptic challengers and mainstream parties during and across both EP campaigns. The results suggest that the potentially higher salience of EU issues among the electorate is not met by a growing and more interactive supply of corresponding partisan debate
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