Matthijs Elenbaas

Mapping EU attitudes: conceptual and empirical dimensions of Euroscepticism and EU support

Public attitudes towards the European Union (EU) are at the heart of a growing body of research. The nature, structure and antecedents of these attitudes, however, are in need of conceptual and empirical refinement. With growing diversification of the policies of the Union, a one-dimensional approach to attitudes towards the EU may be insufficient. This study reviews existing approaches towards theorizing EU public opinion. Based on this inventory, originally collected public opinion survey data (n = 1394) indicate the presence of five dimensions of EU attitudes: performance, identity, affection, utilitarianism and strengthening. The study furthermore shows that different predictors of EU public opinion matter to differing extents when explaining these dimensions. In light of these findings, we suggest tightening the link, conceptually and empirically, between attitudinal dimensions and their antecedents.

Media in the Game of Politics: Effects of Strategic Metacoverage on Political Cynicism

This study examines the effects of generic strategy news, self-referential press news, and “spin” spotlighting publicity coverage on political cynicism, against the backdrop of governance and policy. Drawing on data from two experiments allowing for replication within a single study, the authors demonstrate that exposure to both generic and publicity strategy news aroused political cynicism relative to issue-based news. In addition, the authors found positive interactions between political knowledge and strategic press and publicity news exposure, showing that more knowledgeable individuals were more strongly affected by these frames. The findings are discussed in the light of extant knowledge about framing effects and the medias increasing use of metareporting.

Across time and space: Explaining variation in news coverage of the European Union

News about the European Union (EU) looks different in different countries at different points in time. This study investigates explanations for cross-national and over-time variation in news media coverage of EU affairs drawing on large-scale media content analyses of newspapers and television news in the EU-15 (1999), EU-25 (2004) and EU-27 (2009) in relation to European Parliament (EP) elections. The analyses focus in particular on explanatory factors pertaining to media characteristics and the political elites. Results show that national elites play an important role for the coverage of EU matters during EP election campaigns. The more strongly national parties are divided about the EU in combination with overall more negative positions towards the EU, the more visible the news. Also, increases in EU news visibility from one election to the next and the Europeanness of the news are determined by a countrys elite positions. The findings are discussed in light of the EUs alleged communication deficit.

Explaining Campaign News Coverage: How Medium, Time, and Context Explain Variation in the Media Framing of the 2009 European Parliamentary Elections

It is an open question why news media cover political campaigns the way they do. Framing elections in terms of conflict or strategy or focusing on horse-race framing and the role media and journalists themselves play in elections is commonplace, but this study investigates the factors that explain the variation in campaign news coverage. The context of our study is the 2009 European Parliamentary elections, and we use a cross-national media content analysis (N = 52,009) conducted in all 27 European Union member states. Findings show that time, country, and media characteristics all matter in explaining the way news media frame elections, however, to different extents and with different emphasis. Especially the variation in conflict framing is contingent upon the medium, the electoral system, and public aversion against the EU. We conclude with a discussion of our findings in the light of the ongoing debate on the role and impact of media framing during election campaigns.

Reconciling Passive and Motivated Learning: The Saturation-Conditional Impact of Media Coverage and Motivation on Political Information

Representative democracy requires that citizens express informed political opinions, and in order to inform their opinions, they must have the opportunity to acquire relevant facts from the media. In view of increasing audience segmentation, such opportunity may vary according to how widely political information diffuses across the various sources available in a media environment. However, it remains uncertain how differences in information saturation correspond with differences in information acquisition. Drawing on data from a rolling cross-sectional survey with nearly 60 waves and media content analyses spanning four European countries, this article examines whether a wider availability of information in collective media environments facilitates acquisition of such information. It also specifies the conditions under which this effect differs for people with different levels of learning motivation. Using a multilevel model, we find the media environment to be a remarkably powerful force in equipping people with political information. We also find that better-motivated citizens initially benefit disproportionately from the availability of information, yet motivation-based discrepancies in learning disappear entirely when media coverage becomes more prevalent.

Spin and Political Publicity: Effects on News Coverage and Public Opinion

Contemporary coverage of political affairs is, according to both frequent assertion and a large amount of empirical data, increasingly framed in terms of strategy. Rather than policies and political substance, strategic news emphasizes the tactics that politicians use in pursuing political goals, as well as their performances, styles of campaigning and the battle they fight in the political arena, whether in office, opposition or during elections. The strategy frame has become a leading angle in political coverage of both political campaigns and policy battles, usually at the expense of news about concrete differences in, and the potential resolution of, issue positions between candidates or policymakers (see, for example, Jamieson, 1992; Kerbel, 1997; Lawrence, 2000; Patterson, 2002).