EU Public Legitimation in the Social Media Era: Co‐ordinating the Political Communication of the European Commission

Abstract

This article addresses the question of how the EU gains influence over public legitimacy in the social media era. Existing theories focus either on the type of legitimacy at play without addressing strategic efforts in the digital public sphere, or they focus on self-legitimation without considering the type of legitimacy at stake. However, public legitimation is the result of both institutional conditions and of agency. Strategic efforts in public legitimation are shaped not only by choices between forms of co-ordination but also by the type of legitimacy these efforts attempt to influence. Concurrently, the purpose here is to suggest a new approach to analysing the EU's responses to public legitimacy challenges and to detecting features of good practice in the digital public sphere. Taking a historical approach, the article links existing literatures addressing EU legitimacy, organizational strategy, and political communication. The European Commission is used as an illustrative case example.