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

[img]
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.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

03 Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Institute of Communication and Media Studies (ICMB)

UniBE Contributor:

Eugster, Beatrice, Adam, Silke

Subjects:

300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology

ISSN:

0140-2382

Publisher:

Taylor & Francis

Language:

English

Submitter:

Beatrice Eugster

Date Deposited:

03 Nov 2020 14:57

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:41

Publisher DOI:

10.1080/01402382.2020.1778956

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.147159

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/147159

Actions (login required)

Edit item Edit item
Provide Feedback