Undermining, defusing or defending European integration? Assessing public communication of European executives in times of EU politicisation

Abstract

How do mainstream political executives cue their politicised constituencies on European integration? Moving beyond static expectations that EU politicisation induces executives to either undermine, defuse or defend integration, this article theorises executives' incentives under different configurations of public and partisan Euroscepticism in their home countries. Expectations are tested on the sentiment and complexity that executives attach to European integration in almost 9,000 public speeches delivered throughout the Euro Crisis. It is found that national leaders faced with sceptical public opinion and low levels of partisan Euroscepticism rhetorically undermine integration, whereas European Commissioners faced with similar conditions are prone to defend it. These responses intensify disproportionally with growing public Euroscepticism, but are moderated by Eurosceptic party strength in surprising ways. When such challenger parties come closer to absorbing the Eurosceptic potential in public opinion, executive communication turns more positive again but also involves less clear rhetorical signals. These findings move beyond existing uniform expectations on mainstream responses to Eurosceptic challenges and highlight the relevance of different domestic configurations of EU politicisation.

Beliefs of political leaders: conditions for change in the Eurozone crisis

“…The behaviour of foreign policy elites is based on their assumptions about what people find acceptable (Cantir (Hobolt and De Vries 2016). Recent studies exploring the sentiment, public interests, and complexity of European speeches given by EU HSG reveal that leaders do, indeed, pander to the Eurosceptic mood of the public at home (Rauh et al 2018). Additional research suggests that governments (and their leaders) change position in response to national public opinion on European integration (Toshkov 2011).…”

“…Increased negative support for the EU (EI) is operationalised using an item in the biannual Standard Eurobarometer (see Rauh et al 2018). This item asks respondents the following question: 'In general, does the European Union conjure up for you a very positive, fairly positive, neutral, fairly negative, or very negative image?'…”

Measuring public support for European integration from population-level data using a Bayesian IRT model

“…However, since the 1990s and the end of the "permissive consensus" (Hooghe and Marks, 2009), there has been a growing interest in understanding the impact of public opinion on the European Union's (EU) developments. Against a background of growing contestation and politicisation of the EU, public attitudes towards European integration are now central to understanding European-level policymaking (Hagemann et al, 2017;Wratil, 2019) as well as national-level party strategies (Hutter and Grande, 2014;Hoeglinger, 2016;Rauh et al, 2020). Nevertheless, the precise measurement of public attitudes towards the EU has received relatively limited attention and a wide range of measures has been employed to analyse public support for Europe without clarifying "what we actually mean when we refer to and measure support for European integration" (Hobolt and De Vries, 2016, 415).…”

In Validations We Trust? The Impact of Imperfect Human Annotations as a Gold Standard on the Quality of Validation of Automated Content Analysis

“…debates (Slapin & Proksch, 2010;Spirling, 2016), congressional bills (Wilkerson, Smith, & Stramp, 2015), political speeches (Rauh, Bes, & Schoonvelde, 2019), or millions of social media posts (Barberá et al, 2019). However, with the growing popularity of such "text-as-data" approaches within the field of political communication, the issue of ensuring the validity of the results has become crucial.…”