When do European election campaigns become about Europe?

Eugster, Beatrice; Jalali, Carlos; Maier, Michaela; Bathelt, Severin; Leidecker-Sandmann, Melanie; Adam, Silke; Negrine, Ralph; Demertzis, Nicolas (2020). When do European election campaigns become about Europe? West European politics, 44(7), pp. 1425-1454. Taylor & Francis 10.1080/01402382.2020.1778956

Preview

Text When do European election campaigns_manuscript.pdf - Accepted Version Available under License Publisher holds Copyright. Download (1MB) | Preview

This article examines which parties included European issues in their 2014 European Parliament campaigns, and what influenced whether they did so, based on innovative data from the content analysis of 9,100 press releases in seven countries. Overall, established and especially governing parties no longer shied away from EU issues, referring to them as often as challenger parties did. The likelihood of EU issues in campaigns derives from a combination of predictors from the selective emphasis and co-orientation approaches. In general, parties with high internal dissent on EU integration avoid European issues, and weak leaders will only dare talk about the EU if internal dissent is low. However, between-party-type comparisons indicate that successful leaderships of governing parties facing strong internal divisions are even less likely to put EU issues on the agenda. With respect to the co-orientation model, parties’ EU focus seems to be mainly determined by the communication of (other) opposition parties.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

202 since deposited on 03 Nov 2020
79 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item