Suchergebnisse

Contributions in this thematic issue focus explicitly on citizens and their online engagement with European politics. For social media research in the European Union, citizens remain an understudied actor type in comparison with political elites or news organizations. The reason, we argue, is four key challenges facing social media research in the European Union: legal, ethical, technical, and cultural. To introduce this thematic issue, we outline these four challenges and illustrate how they relate to each contribution. Given that these challenges are unlikely to dissipate, we stress the need for open dialogue about them. A key part of that involves contextualizing research findings within the constraints in which they are produced. Despite these challenges, the contributions showcase that a theoretical and empirical focus on citizens' social media activity can illuminate key insights into vitally important topics for contemporary Europe. These include civic participation, institutional communication, media consumption, gender inequality, and populism.

This WZB Discussion Paper documents in detail the representative claims analysis conducted within the WZB bridging project 'The Political Sociology of Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism'. It serves as methodological background for interpreting the dataset and findings based upon it. The paper includes the aims of this empirical mod-ule in relation to the project, the sampling strategy, the codebook with descriptive statistics from the database, and the results of the intercoder reliability test. The annexes include examples of coded claims and a guide to the database, both in its more qualitative and in its fully quantitative forms. ; Dieses WZB Diskussionspapier befasst sich mit der im Rahmen des Brückenprojekts "Die politische Soziologie des Kosmopolitismus und Kommunitarismus" durchgeführ-ten representative claims analyis. Es dient als methodologische Grundlage für die Interpretation der hierbei entstandenen Datensammlung sowie den aus ihr folgenden Erkenntnissen. Darüber hinaus beinhaltet das Papier die theoretische Ziele mit dem der representative claims analyse durchgeführt werden ist, im Bezug zu das breitere Forschungsprojekt, Angaben zur Stichprobenziehung, das Codebuch mitsamt deskrip-tiver Statistiken aus der Datenbank, sowie die Testergebnisse der Intercoder-Reliabilität. Im Anhang befinden sich Beispiele kodierter Claims und eine Anleitung zur Verwendung der Datensammlung sowohl in qualitativer als auch quantitativer Form.

AbstractExamining (de‐)politicization as an actor‐driven phenomenon, this study asks: How and to what extent do actors in the public sphere attempt to (de‐)politicize European Union (EU) policies? (De‐)politicization is understood not only as a process but also as the deliberate framing of debates over EU issues at a domestic level. This paper conceptualizes (de‐)politicization acts in the public sphere and shows how these can be detected empirically through a claim‐level (de‐)politicization index. This approach is applied to a database of evaluations (claims) on EU trade, by EU actors, national executive actors and societal actors, surrounding the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Comprehensive Economic Trade Agreement, in the media of six Member States (Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, and Denmark). Whilst all kinds of actors may engage in (de‐)politicization, the analysis of the index allows us to determine if a certain category of actors does so to a greater or lesser extent compared with others.

AbstractThis paper examines the politicisation of EU trade policy at the level of the EU's Member States. In an effort to study the variation of politicisation across the EU, going beyond the degree to which an issue is politicised, we map out the debates surrounding EU free trade agreements (TTIP and CETA) in the media of Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland, based on a novel representative claims analysis dataset. We ask whether and how claimants from different EUMS attempt to politicise FTAs in distinct ways. The expectation, based on Castles and Obinger' families of nations, is that the behaviour of claimants belonging to the same family of nations displays overarching features, which sets them apart from other claimants. By way of an actor‐level regression analysis, this study identifies possible correlations between claimant nationalities and types of politicisation. The findings suggest, on the one hand, that there is a link between families of nations, the socio‐economic and institutional trajectories they capture, and types of politicisation. On the other hand, the variation in how issues are politicised is not random but, just like policy outcomes, it appears to 'cluster' following a territoriality logic.

AbstractA burgeoning literature documents the emergence of a new globalization cleavage in Western Europe, centered around the issues of immigration and European integration. We investigate to what extent the globalization cleavage has crystallized by studying the alignment of preferences regarding open borders, their connection to more fundamental elements in the normative component of cosmopolitanism and communitarianism, and the extent to which this links up to the organizational component through party choice. To do this, we use innovative items tapping into political priorities, values, understandings of democracy, and virtues in a cross-sectional comparative survey in Norway and the UK. We find that the globalization cleavage is significantly more developed in the UK than in Norway but lacks a solidified normative component in both. This implies that considerable opportunities remain for ideological entrepreneurs to either fortify or dilute this cleavage, even in the UK.

Advocates of a global democratic parliament have expressed hopes that this would not only legitimize global governance in procedural terms, but also bring about more cosmopolitan policies. They point to the European Parliament as an example of a successful real existing democratic parliament beyond the state with cosmopolitan intent. We analyse plenary debates in the United Nations General Assembly and the European Parliament about the issues of climate change, human rights, migration, trade and European integration between 2004 and 2011 to study the nature of opposition to cosmopolitanism within these two assemblies. We find more vocal and better-organized opposition to cosmopolitanism in the European Parliament than in the United Nations General Assembly. We demonstrate the plausibility that direct and more proportional mechanisms of delegation and accountability in the case of the European Parliament account for this observed difference. Should further research confirm these initial findings, advocates of a global democratic parliament may find that an empowered democratic World Parliament would support less cosmopolitan policies than the current United Nations General Assembly.

AbstractDoes the increasing politicisation ofEurope signify a step towards the legitimation of theUnion? This could be the case if the increased public intensity of debate and polarisation of opinion brought about by politicisation do not fragment the audience and if arguments presented in public are sufficiently clear about the desired nature of the polity. To answer this question, the focus of this article is on dynamic contestation in the public sphere using original data of news platforms and political blogs in 12EU MemberStates and transnational websites during theEuropeanParliament election campaign of 2009. The results are, first, that diffuse eurosceptic evaluations dominate public debates despite large variation in the intensity of debate acrossMemberStates. Second, a majority of evaluations made, particularly those by citizens leaving comments online, are negative in all countries included in this study. A gap between elites and citizens persists, but it appears less pronounced than often proclaimed in the literature. And third, democracy is a primary concern inEUpolity contestation, especially for those evaluating theEUnegatively. Although little evidence is found of a fragmentation of audiences, the prominence of diffuse euroscepticism poses a major challenge to legitimation of theUnion.