Suchergebnisse

Economic considerations, identity related considerations and cueing theory are used for explaining citizens' attitudes towards the European Union. Yet, all of this research has failed to show how elite cues on interests and identities actually reach the citizens. As a consequence, the author argues that domestic mass media as the most widely used source for citizens' information about the European Union has the potential to fill this missing link. Mass media actively construct reality by promoting ideas (agenda-setting and framing) and thereby shaping processes of socialization and persuasion. In this article the author discusses theoretical concepts of how mass media might affect citizens' attitudes, summarizes what we know about the role of domestic mass media in the course of EU integration, derives research desiderates and finally shows why knowledge on the link between mass media and citizens is paramount to understand the future of EU integration.

The article investigates why a specific European issue is debated in one country but disregarded in another, and why issues are debated differently in different European countries. To understand this national filtering, expectations are formulated as to how specific policy traditions and issue-specific conflict constellations within a country are reflected in media debates. A systematic content analysis of the debates on EU enlargement and a common constitution for the years 2000–2002 in the German and French quality press reveals considerable variation in issue salience, actors' prominence and actors' responsibility attributions between and within the countries. This variation can be seen to be connected with different policy traditions and conflict constellations. The study seeks to go beyond merely describing variations in media coverage across Europe and systematically uses cross-national and cross-issue comparative research to understand this variation.

The subject of the research project is the politicization of European issues in the context of European integration. In particular the research project deals with the following question: Do national parties today mobilize – if yes under which conditions and how – on EU integration and thereby foster the politicization of EU integration? Politicization hereby means a process of public debate about political issues that is in particular carried out in the media. To understand the role of national parties for the politicization we distinguish between issue entrepreneurs (parties on the left and right of the political spectrum) and issue traditionalists (mainstream parties). Considering a three-step model of issues' politicization process we analyze in the first step the strategic party communication of issue entrepreneurs and address the following research question: (1) Under which conditions do potential issue entrepreneurs decide to put issues regarding Europe on the agenda (salience) and to publicly voice their positions, and which cleavages do they base their arguments on? In the second step we examine in how far their strategic party behaviour affects the overall party agenda and the mass media agenda with the following question: (2) How effective are issue entrepreneurs in affecting the relevant issue environments, i.e. the overall party agenda and the media agenda within a country? In the third step we are interested whether these agenda changes put pressure on issue traditionalists and question: (3) How do issue traditionalists react to changes in the relevant issue environments?