Europeanisation of EP Election Manifestos: An Application of a New Approach on the Case of Slovak Political Parties

Abstract

This article investigates the Europeanisation of EP election manifestos prepared by Slovak political parties over the course of Slovakia's decade-long membership in the European Union. To this aim, it conducts a content analysis based upon a novel coding scheme in which Europeanisation is measured primarily as EU issue salience and secondarily as the discussion of different EU-related (policy) issue areas. The results show that, in contrast to election manifestos prepared for other elections, the salience of EU issues is quite high in these Euromanifestos. On the other hand, average relative EU issue salience has decreased with each EP election held in the country. In terms of party EU political agenda, we provide evidence of relatively high convergence in terms of party EU political agenda, measured as the five most prominent issue categories in individual party Euromanifestos, particularly in 2004 and 2014. We also show that the five most prominent issue categories in the party EU political agenda represent almost half the natural sentences referring to the EU political level in the Euromanifestos analysed.