Asimina Michailidou

Converging on euroscepticism: Online polity contestation during European Parliament elections

Does the increasing politicisation of Europe signify a step towards the legitimation of the Union? This could be the case if the increased public intensity of debate and polarisation of opinion brought about by politicisation do not fragment the audience and if arguments presented in public are sufficiently clear about the desired nature of the polity. To answer this question, the focus of this article is on dynamic contestation in the public sphere using original data of news platforms and political blogs in 12 EU Member States and transnational websites during the European Parliament election campaign of 2009. The results are, first, that diffuse eurosceptic evaluations dominate public debates despite large variation in the intensity of debate across Member States. Second, a majority of evaluations made, particularly those by citizens leaving comments online, are negative in all countries included in this study. A gap between elites and citizens persists, but it appears less pronounced than often proclaimed in the literature. And third, democracy is a primary concern in EU polity contestation, especially for those evaluating the EU negatively. Although little evidence is found of a fragmentation of audiences, the prominence of diffuse euroscepticism poses a major challenge to legitimation of the Union.

Mediatized representative politics in the European Union: towards audience democracy?

Unlike the institutional and constitutional set-up of the compound system of EU political representation, the politicized and mass-mediated aspects of EU representative politics have only recently started to receive scholarly attention. In this contribution, we argue for a reconceptualization of EU political representation as a triadic and mediatized communicative act between political agents, constituents and the audience. We then apply the notion of ‘audience democracy’ to the representative politics of the EU, which after decades of operation within the parliamentary and political party spheres with the ‘permissive consensus’ of its citizens, are in the last few years increasingly and decisively carried out in the (mediatized) public sphere. Last but not least, we discuss the role of ‘audience democracy’ in constraining or enriching the democratic legitimacy of the EU.

Mediati(zi)ng EU politics: Online news coverage of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections

Abstract In this paper we propose that the concept of mediatization should be used not only in the narrow sense to analyze the impact of media on the operational modes of the political system, but also in more general terms to capture the transformation of the public sphere and the changing conditions for the generation of political legitimacy. More specifically and with regard to the role of political communication on the internet, we focus on the transformative potential of online media in terms of a) publicity: the capacity of the online media to focus public attention on the political process of the EU; b) participation: the capacity of the online media to include plural voices and activate the audience; and c) public opinion formation: the capacity of the online media to enable informed opinions. We test our mediatization model on the online debates that took place during the 2009 EU elections (May–June 2009) in 12 member-states and at the trans-European level. The findings confirm the mediatizing impact of online political communication on the generation of the political legitimacy of the EU. Online media constitute a virtually shared forum for political communication that political actors and users increasingly occupy developing homogenous patterns of evaluating European integration. Furthermore, the stronghold of offline media in the EU e-sphere and the tendency to discuss the EP elections within the frame of domestic (national) politics reaffirm the key role of national political and media cultures.

The role of the public in shaping EU contestation: Euroscepticism and online news media

The participation of the public in framing and debating the news has added a new layer in the making of European Union contestation and the European public sphere, traditionally driven by journalists and political elites. Drawing on news coverage of the ongoing Eurocrisis (2010–2013) and the 2009 European Parliament elections, this article examines the structure and content of European Union contestation in mainstream online news media over time and across several European Union member states. The cross-national patterns that emerge from this analysis strongly suggest that, despite the differences between the observed online news spheres, the European Union is rather uniformly contested: national politics firmly remain the key defining ‘frame’; Eurosceptic claims are very much focused on the present rather than the future; and contributors often appeal to the public’s emotions rather than reason. Furthermore, the Eurocrisis appears to have consolidated European Union contestation on the more substantial issues of power, solidarity and accountability.

The European Crisis and the Media: Media Autonomy, Public Perceptions and New Forms of Political Engagement

The current economic and political crisis has become an experience that immediately affects the life chances of many citizens. For many Europeans the necessity to cope with the negative consequences of crisis requires immediate responses and the development of resilience. This new immediateness of how Europe is experienced through crisis contrasts sharply with the many hurdles of mediation between the European Union (EU) political system and the lifeworlds of the citizens. Due to the technocratic character of the EU rescue measures, which are taken to secure economic and monetary stability, EU decision makers have become less responsive to the demands for public legitimation. Thus, while directly affecting millions of citizens, the crisis has at the same time widened the EU’s public communication and legitimation deficit. EU institutions and national governments are under constraints to consolidate new regulatory competences, but they are at the same time increasingly deprived of the possibilities to legitimize these increased powers in a democratic fashion (Habermas 2013). They lack, in short, the mediating capacities to include the wider populations in informed opinion making and to respond to the concerns and fears of the people affected by crisis. And it is not only the communication aspect of crisis management that is lacking: the gulf between what is economically required and what is socially and democratically acceptable is widening.

A Media Perspective on Political Representation: Online Claims-Making and Audience Formation in 2009 EP Election Campaigns

Mass media play a crucial, though frequently neglected, role in the social construction of political representation. Media touch the core meaning of political representation, in Hanna Pitkin’s famous words: the making present of something which is nevertheless not literally present (Pitkin 1967: 144). Most importantly, mass media do not only create a notion of presence of the absent, they are also the field of contestation about the meaning of ‘presence’ and its wider implications (Hall 1997). In modern, anonymous mass politics the relationships between decision-making actors and the constituency of those who are potentially affected by these decisions is usually mediated. The performance of political agents is represented by media discourse and as such constructs the political reality that becomes salient to a broader audience, from which the ‘principal’ of representative politics is constituted. Mass media can therefore be said to build a ‘representative relationship’ between those who ‘perform’ in the political arena and those who interpret and evaluate the performance from the balcony. The principal-agent relationship of political representation is thus reproduced in the relationship of mass media and politics.

Twitter, Public Engagement and the Eurocrisis: More than an Echo Chamber?

Drawing on the concepts of echo and refraction, this chapter zooms in on the role of digital media in crisis communication and the conditions under which social media can spearhead a shift in public communication dynamics. The empirical analysis presented here offers a qualitative profiling of the mini Twittersphere concerning the Greek referendum (Greferendum) that took place in July 2015. Which contributors have the highest visibility and what type of content do they produce? Which sources are favoured in retweets? On which aspects of the Greferendum did the Twittersphere focus? The findings are used to further the discussion regarding the impact of social media on the European public sphere’s capacity to nurture democratic debate.

‘The Germans are back’: Euroscepticism and anti-Germanism in crisis-stricken Greece†

ABSTRACT The Eurocrisis has generated a deep and ongoing politicization of the EU within and across national public spheres, fuelling age-old and new political and social conflicts, which in turn shape public perceptions of crisis and the legitimacy of ‘crisis government’. Focusing on Greece, an EU member state at the epicentre of the crisis, this paper examines how the European polity was contested in the first five years (2009–2013) of the ‘Eurocrisis’. During this period, anti-German stereotypes resurfaced in the Greek public sphere in parallel with increasingly mainstream Euroscepticism. Nevertheless, analysis of news and social media content from this period shows that beneath this new-found scepticism towards the EU and Germanys role in it lie two much broader narratives: that of the power struggle between the people and the political elites; and that of an epic clash between diametrically different political ideologies.

Understanding a digital movement of opinion: the case of #RefugeesWelcome

ABSTRACT Recent work on digital political engagement has extensively shown that social media platforms enhance political participation and collective action. However, the idea that citizen voice through social media can give rise, under given conditions, to a specific digital force combining properties of social movements and public opinion has received less attention. We fill this gap by analysing the digital discussion around the Twitter hashtag #RefugeesWelcome as a case of ‘digital movement of opinion’ (DMO). When the refugee crisis erupted in 2015, an extraordinary wave of empathy characterized the publics’ reactions in key European hosting countries, especially as a result of viral images portraying refugee children as the main victims. Using a triangulation of network, content and metadata analysis, we find that this DMO was driven primarily by social media elites whose tweets were then echoed by masses of isolated users. We then test the post-DMO status of the hashtag-sphere after a potentially antithetical shock such as the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, which polarized the network public. Overall, we argue that the concept of DMO provides a heuristically useful tool for future research on new forms of digital citizen participation.

“SECOND-ORDER” ELECTIONS AND ONLINE JOURNALISM

European Parliament elections are often classified as “second-order” and there are few pan-European media outlets through which European Union (EU) elites can address voters directly. Given these conditions, can online journalism help broaden the scope of European political communication, facilitate interaction across the borders and refocus European Parliamentary election coverage on EU issues? Using an analytical model based on the public sphere, this article assesses online reporting of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections in Greece, Sweden and the United Kingdom, on three levels: publicization; participation; and public opinion formation. The results show that despite the differences between the selected countries in terms of online communication infrastructure and the maturity of the online public sphere, cross-national patterns of European Parliamentary election coverage emerge. This allows for reserved optimism regarding the role of online journalism in the building of a European public sphere.