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Why have referendums on European integration proliferated since the 1970s? How are referendums accommodated within member states' constitutional orders and with what impact on the European integration process? What is the likely institutional impact of referendums on the future of the European integration process? Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, these are just some of the fundamental questions addressed in this book. The central thesis is that the EU is faced with a 'direct democratic dilemma', which is compounded by the EU's rigid constitutional structure and a growing politicisation of the referendum device on matters related to European integration. Referendums and the European Union discusses how this dilemma has emerged to impact on the course of integration and how it can be addressed.

Voting advice applications (VAAs) are online tools that have become increasingly popular and purportedly aid users in deciding which party/candidate to vote for during an election. In this paper we present an innovation to current VAA design which is based on the introduction of a social network element. We refer to this new type of online tool as a social voting advice application (SVAA). SVAAs extend VAAs by providing (a) community-based recommendations, (b) comparison of users' political opinions, and (c) a channel of user communication. In addition, SVAAs enriched with data mining modules, can operate as citizen sensors recording the sentiment of the electorate on issues and candidates. Drawing on VAA datasets generated by the Preference Matcher research consortium, we evaluate the results of the first VAA-Choose4Greece-which incorporated social voting features and was launched during the landmark Greek national elections of 2012. We demonstrate how an SVAA can provide community based features and, at the same time, serve as a citizen sensor. Evaluation of the proposed techniques is realized on a series of datasets collected from various VAAs, including Choose4Greece. The collection is made available online in order to promote research in the field.

The German federal election of 2017 saw significant losses for the two German mainstream parties (Volksparteien) and governing coalition partners, the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD). The major beneficiary was the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-populist party, which almost tripled its amount of votes received from the 2013 federal election. Making use of data from a Voting Advice Application, this article seeks to explore the AfD’s extraordinary electoral success with particular attention to the party’s capacity to attract voters from the two mainstream and traditionally powerful parties. Drawing on the literature on radical right-wing parties in Europe and tracking the route of AfD from a single-issue Eurosceptic party to a radical party with broader programmatic appeal, this work tests hypotheses regarding demographic, political and attitudinal determinants of voting for AfD, in general, and switching one’s vote to AfD from CDU/CSU or SPD more specifically. In line with previous literature, individual-level analyses show that voting for the AfD seems to be more tangentially related to demographic variables, such as sex, age and education and more strongly connected to political concerns, e.g. “conservative” self-placement and attitudes toward specific policies, immigration and Euroscepticism in particular.

This article explores the territorial and temporal patterns of EU cohesion policy media coverage. The topic content and tone of news are analysed using topic modelling and sentiment analysis techniques, which are applied to a new corpus of over 4,000 English and Spanish news stories from the period 2010 to 2017 across three territorial levels. In line with our theoretical expectations, we found significant differences in the tone used across territorial levels, with national and transnational levels being more negative than the regional level. While national and transnational media place relatively more emphasis on politicized EU topics, subnational media focus more on substantive policy topics corresponding with EU policy objectives. Furthermore, media reporting on the cohesion policy evolved significantly over time and reacted to external events, such as the euro and migration crises, as well as internal, country‐specific events, such as Brexit in the UK and corruption scandals in Spain. However, the tone of cohesion policy news is positive overall suggesting that the media can, in principle, contribute to public support for the policy and the EU more generally.