Abstract
It is an old concern in public and academic debates that people are not interested in European-level issues, and even European Parliamentary election campaigns, which are the main democratic tools of the European Union (EU) to involve ordinary people into political decision-making, are mostly about national-level political topics. Moreover, even when European issues emerge, the context of its discussion is often harmful to European integration and strengthens the perceived importance of domestic politics. In the age of social media, however, users’ content preferences may significantly affect the presence of different political levels in political campaigns, but these preferences are still largely uncovered in academic literature. To fill this gap, we investigate the direct and moderated effects of European-focused Facebook posts on user engagement drawing upon a content analysis dataset including 9,688 posts of 68 parties from 12 EU countries. In line with the well-known second-order election hypothesis (Reif & Schmitt, 1980) we hypothesize a negative direct main effect. However, we also assume that this effect is moderated by several content-, and party-level factors, and when people engage with European-level contents they do it with those ones that are posted by populist parties, focused on a few divisive hot topics, and are framed with a negative tone. Moreover, we expect cross-country differences. We find that on the whole, user engagement with national-level political content prevails over the European-level, but in some countries there are no remarkable differences in user engagement patterns of the two levels. While our findings mostly confirm the second-order election hypothesis, they also demonstrate that European politics can spread within social media platforms in a less divisive and negative way than we expected. European-focused posts do not perform better when they are posted by populist parties, focused selectively on the salient issues of immigration or environment, or framed in a negative way.
Highlights
It is a long‐standing concern that the European‐level is of secondary importance behind the national‐level in European politics, even in the case of European Parliament (EP) elections (Reif & Schmitt, 1980)
On the whole, user engagement with national‐level political content prevails over the European‐level, but users do not engage with European Union (EU)‐level posts more when they are presented in a context that can be harmful to the EU‐project: There is no engage‐ ment gap between supportive and more skeptical coun‐ tries, populist parties are not more effective with their EU‐focused posts, and the negatively framed and divi‐
Our research focused on one dimension of citizen engagement with European politics, namely engage‐ ment via Facebook as a response to the campaigns of political parties across 12 member states during the 2019 EP election
Summary
It is a long‐standing concern that the European‐level is of secondary importance behind the national‐level in European politics, even in the case of European Parliament (EP) elections (Reif & Schmitt, 1980) Scholars argue that this fact contributes to the democratic deficit of the European Union (EU; Follesdal & Hix, 2006) and is a barrier to the development and deepening of the European integration process. This second‐order character of European politics can be partly explained by communication‐related factors. In the last few years, the political communi‐ cation environment has significantly transformed, and it is media and political actors anymore who are able to shape the visibility of political topics, but citizens’ social media activity can exert remarkable influence on the public agenda (Blumler, 2016)
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