National Public Spheres Research Articles

Does personalisation further Europeanise national public spheres? The Spitzenkandidat process in the 2014 and 2019 European parliamentary elections

ABSTRACT This paper explores whether the lead candidates process for the European Commission’s Presidency (Spitzenkandidat) increases the Europeanisation of national public spheres to a certain extent. National public spheres are likely to be Europeanised when simultaneous discussions of the same topics take place across member states and under the same criteria of relevance. Focusing on the media-related public sphere, the research employs quantitative content analysis and qualitative frame analysis in the German, Luxembourgish, French, Belgian, Spanish, Italian, Greek, and British press for the 2014 and 2019 European elections. While in 2014, the salience of the Spitzenkandidat process was relevantly high, despite certain country- and media-specific variations, in 2019, the press coverage dropped off by almost half. At the same time, most of the selected newspapers reported on the issue using the same criteria of relevance, namely, similar frames and meaning structures.

The State of Europeanisation: between Clash and Convergence. A comparison of the media coverage of the 2019 European Elections in seven countries

The issue of the Europeanisation of national public spheres is a question as to how a discursive media space can be created within the EU. There are forces of convergence at work, such as networking within the borderless digital space. At the same time, there are counterforces: increasing nationalism and populists who identify ‘Brussels’ as a target for their criticism of elites. The vision of a European public sphere appears to share the same fate as the European project as such; as a result of years of crisis, optimism has given way to disillusion. Using coverage of the 2019 EU elections in seven European countries (a total of 57,943 articles from Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, and the UK), we draw a picture of a heterogeneous EU public. What is particularly clear is that the phenomena of horizontal and vertical Europeanisation require more nuanced interpretations. While a high degree of horizontal Europeanisation indicates convergent and pro-European media coverage (as in the cases of Germany and Portugal), a high degree of vertical Europeanisation may indicate polarised publics or an unfree media landscape (as in the UK and Hungary). From a methodological point of view, the study shows that a combination of computational content analysis and international cooperation between scientists can advance research into the European public.

Глобальная альтернативная общественность в Instagram: опыт сетевого анализа русскоязычных блогов о миграции

The article examines the foreign Russian-language blogosphere on Instagram through the lenses of the public sphere theory. The study revealed active cooperation of bloggers living in different countries during coverage of the coronavirus pandemic in March-April 2020. More than 4,000 Russian-speaking Instagram users commenting on posts became members of the networked publics because of this cooperation, the audience coverage of the most popular bloggers exceeded the threshold of one hundred thousand subscribers. Bloggers who initiated contributory publications on the situation with COVID-19 in their countries were points of crystallization of public discussions for people with migration experience, who are often excluded from the national public spheres of both their home countries and countries of residence. By inviting their subscribers to get acquainted with the situation in different countries, bloggers have formed a global arena that arises at the intersection of online public groups that have developed around bloggers. The main mechanism for creating such an arena is the cooperation of bloggers aimed at their own promotion and helping other bloggers in opposing the algorithms of the online platform. Collaboration in the form of a one-time publication of posts on the same topic, united by a unique hashtag and including direct links to bloggers from other countries, leads to the emergence of online ad hoc, or situational, global media in Russian. In the arena constituted by ad hoc media, Russian-speaking migrants living in different countries could discuss the measures that states were taking to defeat the pandemic. At the same time, this global networked public remains a “weak public” that has not transformed into a participatory counter-public sphere.

How Influential Are International NGO s in the Public Arena?

Summary International non-governmental organisations have, for some time, been operating as diplomacy actors in the national and international public spheres. There has been an increase in their influence in the local areas of intervention of their programmes and in broader spaces where polices about the environment, inequality and other issues are decided. However, their influence has been threatened by the emergence of social movements and a flexible style of individualised activism that promotes their demands, as well as by questions around their independence and legitimacy that some of their actions generate cyclically. COVID-19 has brought into the public sphere some old challenges that international non-governmental organisations (INGO s) have been working on for years: health vulnerability, economic precarity and social emergency. This essay analyses this context, in which new challenges are appearing for INGO s concerning how they can influence the public sphere and policy-making, with the collaboration of new allies and partners.

Identity and European Public Spheres in the Context of Social Media and Information Disorder

It was expected that the increasing coverage of EU affairs in national public spheres would lead to a greater sense of European belonging. The Internet was expected to foster this process. However, these expectations do not square with the current political climate of identity politics and the revitalisation of nationalism. How can this incongruence between theory and reality be understood? An intervening variable has added an unpredictability to the mix: information disorder. It is our view that this theory needs revising to include other intervening variables such as social media and information disorder. In this article, we argue that the current dynamic of Europeanised political communication is likely to compromise the civic and vertical components of EU-identity.

Regulating patient access to therapeutics in Denmark: a rhetorical analysis of welfare imaginaries in public controversy.

ABSTRACTIn this article, I argue that the social imaginaries that inform biomedical regulation circulate not only in technical spheres populated by experts but that they are equally articulated (and vehemently contested) in national public spheres in more popular forms of communication. I examine the relation between a national healthcare imaginary and the regulation of therapeutics through a public controversy about access to an innovative therapeutic indicated for spinal muscular atrophy. The establishment of the Danish Medicines Council, a new health technology assessment institution, and its decision to restrict access to an innovative therapeutic sparked controversy in 2017 involving political proponents, adversaries, and patients, among others. In a variety of ways, they rhetorically mobilized or contested the Danish universalist welfare imaginary which contains promises and prospects of solidarity, security, and absence of market forces in universal healthcare, including access to therapeutics. I use a combination of media content analysis and rhetorical close reading methods to analyze how the imaginary was drawn upon in arguments for and against the new regulatory institution.

Agents of Europeanization: Think Tanks Discussing the Refugee Crisis in the Czech Republic

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Think Tanks in Central and Eastern Europe”, guest-edited by Katarzyna Jezierska and Serena Giusti. What is the role of think tanks in Europeanization of national public spheres? To address this question, our paper explores the performance of think tanks in the immigration debate in the Czech Republic. Employing political claims analysis (PCA) and treating think tanks as boundary organizations active in multiple fields, we compare the levels of Europeanization of political claims made by think tanks with other actors. Our data set includes 2,374 political claims made on broadcast public TV in the period from April 2015 to March 2016. According to our quantitative data, Czech think tanks chose the discursive strategy of Europeanization more often than any other actor represented. Thus, think tanks have the potential to support Europeanization of national public spheres. However, their representation in media coverage is relatively low. Our results also demonstrate that think tanks should be treated as sui generis organizations since their strategy in the public sphere deviates from that of other civil society organizations. Think tanks Europeanized their claims-making, but others largely stayed on the national level while discussing the refugee crisis.

Introducing Change in Public Service Organizations under Austerity: The Complex Case of the Governance of the Defence in the United Kingdom

Introducing, managing, and sustaining change in public service organizations is challenging for policy makers to implement and for scholars to theorize. In 2010, the U.K. Government introduced policy changes to help bring down the national deficit. The executive's planned reforms aimed to deliver a so‐called battle‐winning military force, a smaller and more professional Ministry of Defence, and an affordable overall defence organization. The article borrows from theories of management and public policy to help enlighten our understanding of change under New Public Management and governance approaches. The article's central claim is that the U.K. Government sought to correct cost‐efficiency processes in public service organizations trying to reshape organizational and managerial structures dependent on many internal and external pressures. The article examines the executive's purpose in developing a need for change and the ways to implement it. I question whether the U.K. Government's prescriptive and hierarchical approach to organizational change in public administration is sustainable in the long term.Related ArticlesAriely, Gal. 2011. “Why People (Dis)Like the Public Service: Citizen Perception of the Public Service and the NPM Doctrine.” Politics & Policy 39 (6): 997‐1019. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2011.00329.xBurau, Viola, and Carole Clavier. 2018. “Understanding Gaps in the Coexistence between Different Modes of Governance: A Case Study of Public Health in Schools in a Multilevel System.” Politics & Policy 46 (4): 604‐629. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12269Monza, Sabina, and Eva Anduiza. 2016. “The Visibility of the EU in the National Public Spheres in Times of Crisis and Austerity.” Politics & Policy 44 (3): 499‐524. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12163

Debating the Urban, the Rural and the Foreign: Łódź in the Polish Urban Discourse of Late Russian Poland

The article scrutinizes the Polish-speaking debate over industrial modernity regarding Łodź, a multi-ethnic textile factory hub on the over-industrialized Western fringe of the Russian Empire. I collate external and internal voices expressed in the press regarding modernity, urbanity and the status of the city within the national public sphere to reveal assumptions about the urban and the rural which underpinned cultural criticism targeting the industrial hotbed and attempts at self-assertion on the part of local elites. A specific developmental trajectory of rapid and barely regulated industrial growth, an ethnically mixed population, and high social polarization secured a highly ambiguous perception of this city. Warsaw-centered elites produced a specific mode of accusation against urbanity, denying its very existence in a place that could not be easily integrated into Polish, nationalistically colored, modern aspirations. From a broader perspective, the presented analysis maps the binary structure of the rural vs. the urban on the larger field of debate over modernity, the “urban question,” citizenship and national self-assertion.

South Pacific Brownface: Racial Imposture, Global Markets, and National Theatre in Tapu (1903)

New Zealand critics and audiences in 1903 hailed Tapu (by Alfred Hill and Arthur Adams) as the harbinger of a new ‘national drama’. They thought that the comic opera captured the national essence and would broadcast the nation's advantages to a global audience. Yet the production never made it beyond Sydney, and has since disappeared from the historical record. My analysis of the script and critical reception shows that Tapu faltered in its confused adoption of a wide array of techniques of racial mimicry (borrowed from metropolitan theatres) to represent indigenous Māori and white visitors, but not the native-born settler population. The story of Tapu's failure, I argue, reveals something about the transnational conditions for the constitution of a national public sphere, and the indispensability of race as a supplement to that nation. It attunes us to the force of performance genre and repertoire as vehicles of racial information and affect, pointing to the ways in which conformity, rather than invention, was the ticket to success in the emergent global culture industries. If popular performance, and specifically racial mimicry, operated as a public experiment with the racial properties of citizenship – as a generation of scholarship on race and performance has argued – to what extent was that experiment controlled by the conventions of the global commodity market? This essay reaches insights that will be of interest to scholars of (trans)national performance history, settler whiteness and global indigeneity, and is germane to disciplinary debates on minstrelsy, ethnological show business, and cultural appropriation.

Ordinary Citizens in Swiss Public Television News: Representing a National Public Sphere?

ABSTRACTSimilar to the European Union, Switzerland faces the challenge of a multilingual and multicultural public sphere. The swiss media finds itself in-between the goals of providing a national Swiss public and ensuring a political, social, and cultural integration on a domestic level. Therefore, the portrayal of ordinary citizens in public debates on Swiss television news becomes a matter of citizen actors representing the “people’s voice” as counterbalance to elite and civil institutional actors; as well as citizen actors as a representation of Switzerland’s multilingual and multicultural public sphere as an element of understanding, solidarity, and exchange between the three language areas. Our quantitative content analysis within the news of the first channels in each language region (SRF 1, RTS un and RSI LA 1) shows that although ordinary citizens function as counterparts to political and other elite actor groups, their high visibility does not equate strong voices being heard in the national public debate. Ordinary citizens very rarely get the chance to actively raise their voices or represent voices from other language areas.

Austerity and fragmentation: Dynamics of Europeanization of media discourses in Greece and Italy

Abstract This article investigates media representations of the European financial crisis in Greece and Italy. We study the Euro crisis as an ‘emergency situation’ with domino effects, where media played a central role in shaping communication practices at the national level as well as between the two countries. Drawing upon vertical and horizontal dynamics of Europeanization, we map the convergences and divergences in media discourses that surround the period 2011–2015. In doing so, we elaborate a qualitative analysis of newspaper articles focusing, in particular, on the themes of austerity and the fragmentation of Europe. Our argument suggests that national public spheres in times of transnational crisis become increasingly nationalized; yet under certain circumstances such as when the supranational infrastructure is the target of blame, they converge, opening the path toward a transnational discursive dialogue.

On Global Time in Revolutionary Japan

This article reveals how Japanese anti-regime rebels in the mid-1870s deployed news of the Ottoman Empire and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 in a burgeoning national public sphere to justify and encourage violent revolution against the Meiji government. It focuses especially on commentary in Hyōron shinbun and its successor publications Chūgai hyōron and Bunmei shinshi, short-lived radical newspapers linked to what became the Kagoshima and Kumamoto rebel factions in the Japanese civil war of 1877. Anti-government agitators drew from French and American theory and history and constructed Turkey as a hidebound violator of freedom and civil rights, casting the Turkish case as a parable for what would befall the Meiji government, supposedly a similar wielder of despotism. They inveighed at the same time against European powers for seizing on “Asian” weakness to expand their empires in Asia. Newspapers thus produced a sense of global simultaneity, intimating to readers that they lived in the same empirical moment as people across the world, but as they constructed this empirical simultaneity, they produced also a sense of theoretical nonsynchronicity, in which the histories of some nations acted as the futures of others. Violent revolution, the journalists suggested, provided the best means of reconciling these dual temporalities of global time.

After the refugee crisis: public discourse and policy change in Denmark, Norway and Sweden

The refugee crisis of 2015 can be characterised as an exogenous shock, an immigration shock, which according to institutional theory may create a window of opportunity for path-breaking policy change. In all three Scandinavian countries a range of new policy proposals were made in order to stem the incoming migration. Although the direction of policy change pointed in a similar restrictive direction, the choice of policy instruments differed, as did the style and content of policy actors’ legitimizing and coordinating discourses.Drawing on the analytical framework of discursive institutionalism, the three cases illustrate how a similar kind of external shock (the refugee crisis) was construed differently in different national public spheres, and generated different kinds of policy responses – in particular with respect to the social rights of refugees. The emphasis on legitimizing communicative discourse and coordinating discourse differed between the countries. In Sweden, the need to legitimize policy change normatively was acute. This mattered less in Denmark, where emphasis was on creating stable political support for a range of specific measures. Norway takes a mixed position between the two. Data includes a selection of media texts from six newspapers in 2015 as well as policy texts from 2015 and 2016.

Publics, Scientists, and the State: Mapping the Human Genome Editing Controversy

Literature on scientific controversies has inadequately attended to the impact of globalization and, more specifically, the emergence of China as a leader in scientific research. To bridge this gap in the literature, this article develops a theoretical framework to analyze global scientific controversies surrounding research in China. The framework highlights the existence of four overlapping discursive arenas — China’s national public sphere and national expert sphere, the transnational public sphere and the transnational expert sphere. It then examines the struggles over inclusion/exclusion and publicity within these spheres as well as the within- and across- sphere effects of such struggles. Empirically, the article analyses the human genome-editing controversy surrounding research by scientists in China between 2015-2019. It shows how elite scientists negotiated expert–public relationships within and across the national and transnational expert spheres, how unexpected disruption at the nexus of the four spheres disarrayed expert-public relationships envisioned by elite experts, and how the Chinese state intervened to reshape the boundary between openness and secrecy at both national and transnational levels.

Europe’s Europes: mapping the conflicts of European memory

ABSTRACTDebates about ‘European memory’ are frequent in public and political discourse. With the fundamental challenges the European project now faces, such debates exemplify changes in what Europe means and implies politically. Drawing on a large corpus of press articles from six EU member states and employing qualitative and quantitative methods of discourse analysis, the article examines the fields and logics of conflict about the meaning of Europe between 2004 and 2016. Intimately linked to national and post-national senses of identity, these conflicts take four different forms across different national public spheres: (1) perspectives from which ‘European memory’ underpins seemingly consensual conceptions of Europe; (2) conflictive conceptions of Europe along an East-West divide that present different attempts of setting rules; (3) memory conflicts establishing peripheries and boundaries of Europe; (4) a global framing of ‘Europe’ that understands Europe as a space of competition that mobilizes triadic patterns of conflict. The fits and misfits, and the degrees of entanglement on conflicts about ‘European memory’ help to understand the persistent and continuous struggles over the mental maps of Europe beyond the simplistic opposition of particularism and cosmopolitanism.

The Spread and Domestication of the Term “Austerity:” Evidence from the Portuguese and Spanish Parliaments

This article explores what happens when the term “austerity” becomes a global catchword. Specifically, we study how this term has been used in national policy making in the Portuguese and Spanish parliaments from the 1970s until recently. We show that although Portugal and Spain were in a somewhat different situation regarding the 2008 economic crisis, the increased popularity of the term austerity occurred practically simultaneously in the Portuguese and Spanish parliaments. This suggests that the term's popularity in political debates is not solely determined by a nation's political or fiscal situation. Rather, our contention is that employing the term austerity to discuss government policies became a global fashion after the fiscal crisis of 2008. The study also shows why austerity became an increasingly popular concept: the term changed from being mainly used in fiscal policy to being commonly used in other policy areas too.Related ArticlesExadaktylos, Theofanis, and Nikolaos Zahariadis. 2014. “Quid pro Quo: Political Trust and Policy Implementation in Greece during the Age of Austerity.” Politics & Policy 42 (1): 160‐183. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12058Monza, Sabina, and Eva Anduiza. 2016. “The Visibility of the EU in the National Public Spheres in Times of Crisis and Austerity.” Politics & Policy 44 (3): 499‐524. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12163Sager, Fritz, and Markus Hinterleitner. 2016. “How do Credit Rating Agencies Rate? An Implementation Perspective on the Assessment of Austerity Programs during the European Debt Crisis.” Politics & Policy 44 (4): 783‐815. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12165

Framing EU trade policy online: the case of @NoAlTTIP on Twitter

Since the argumentative turn in EU studies, research has shown that civil society activists can challenge frames promoted by EU institutions and incumbent groups, and influence public opinion in the EU. However, most studies of civil society mobilisation on EU issues have focused on the vertical framing of issues from Brussels to national capitals, rarely analysing mobilisation beyond Brussels. This article builds upon ongoing research on Spanish civil society activism on the TTIP (Bouza & Oleart, 2018) and framing EU issues on Twitter (Bouza & Tuñón, 2018), contributing to the study of the role of national activists in the horizontal translation of EU-wide mobilisation to national publics. We argue that national actors play an influential role in the discursive struggle to define ‘Europe’ and the EU in the (national) public spheres (Díez Medrano, 2003). Building on our previous analysis of national activism on TTIP in Spain, we analyse whether activists have engaged in a process of frame bridging (Snow et al., 1986), in order to expand the mobilisation against TTIP towards new issues and constituencies relating to the broader trade strategy of the EU. The present research addresses the role of the Spanish anti- TTIP social movement in the emergence, circulation and bridging of critical frames on the TTIP negotiations in the Spanish Twitter sphere. The article combines quantitative and qualitative methods –network analysis and framing analysis– in order to analyse the role of the @NoAlTTIP network in the building and diffusion of frames challenging the EU institutions discourse on trade in the Spanish context.

Framing EU trade policy online: the case of @NoAlTTIP on Twitter

Since the argumentative turn in EU studies, research has shown that civil society activists can challenge frames promoted by EU institutions and incumbent groups, and influence public opinion in the EU. However, most studies of civil society mobilisation on EU issues have focused on the vertical framing of issues from Brussels to national capitals, rarely analysing mobilisation beyond Brussels. This article builds upon ongoing research on Spanish civil society activism on the TTIP (Bouza & Oleart, 2018) and framing EU issues on Twitter (Bouza & Tuñón, 2018), contributing to the study of the role of national activists in the horizontal translation of EU-wide mobilisation to national publics. We argue that national actors play an influential role in the discursive struggle to define ‘Europe’ and the EU in the (national) public spheres (Díez Medrano, 2003). Building on our previous analysis of national activism on TTIP in Spain, we analyse whether activists have engaged in a process of frame bridging (Snow et al., 1986), in order to expand the mobilisation against TTIP towards new issues and constituencies relating to the broader trade strategy of the EU. The present research addresses the role of the Spanish anti- TTIP social movement in the emergence, circulation and bridging of critical frames on the TTIP negotiations in the Spanish Twitter sphere. The article combines quantitative and qualitative methods –network analysis and framing analysis– in order to analyse the role of the @NoAlTTIP network in the building and diffusion of frames challenging the EU institutions discourse on trade in the Spanish context.

The case for communication rights: A rights-based approach to media development

From the 1980s, international organizations have devised strategies to develop national media systems to make them more diverse and inclusive so as to both exhibit and preserve local cultures. However, these strategies have not always been successful since information has become a commodity, because the interests of private actors prevent equal access to communication rights. This article outlines a perspective on media development from a rights-based approach, derived from a critique of dominant perspectives from international organizations with a strong focus on technology provisions. The article argues for media development based on the right to communication as an alternative to commodification of information. Through examples from Brazil and Kenya, the article illustrates that viewing communication as a basic right can lead to the inclusion of more voices in the public discourse. In addition, a model for media development is proposed, suggesting that the state and national civil society play a significant role in promoting diverse national public spheres.