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Examining (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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) is in search of a new narrative to create a sense of common purpose, but it is unclear around which values that narrative should be built. To analyse how different narratives resonate in Europe's public spheres, this article presents a novel dataset based on claims analysis of newspaper articles from Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland and Denmark between 2012 and 2019 on the issues of migration, the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), trade and counterterrorism. Descriptive and logistic regression analyses show how different frames have been used for various policy agendas. This reveals considerable variation, but comparatively low levels of explained variance. Europe's public spheres can thus be described as a 'justification jungle', where many actors use a range of arguments to back up diverging political demands. This poses a formidable obstacle to any single narrative of European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stronger European Union (EU) competencies come with greater media presence, according to existing cross-sectional comparisons. While presence comes with the power to influence public discourse, we know little about how it affects the overall tone of public discourse. This article investigates the effect of the empowerment of EU institutions on media presence and the tone of debate in the EU. It does this through an original claims analysis of newspaper articles in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and Poland during the height of the Euro crisis (2011–2012), the Greek bailout crisis (2015), and the Italian budget crisis (2018). EU media presence indeed increases following empowerment. However, this does not result in a more pro-European debate, because pro-European national voices are crowded out. While this does not affect the desirability of austerity, it does harden Eurosceptic public discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes recent trends of democratic backsliding within the European Union (EU). While some scholars highlight threats to the rule of law and judicial independence as the key development and problem, others focus on elite discourse and partisan competition. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the essence of democratic backsliding by analyzing changes between 1990 and 2019 on key indicators of democracy – polyarchy, liberalism, participation, deliberation and egalitarianism – documented in the V-Dem dataset, within the European Union. We find that democratic backsliding at its core is structured by a deterioration of the quality of deliberation. Deliberation is also the component where EU member states differ amongst each other the most and which has featured the greatest deterioration in recent years. We conclude by spelling out the implications this has for EU policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on policy responsiveness of the European Union has adopted the systemic model from national contexts. This focusses on the static congruence or the dynamic adaptation of aggregated policy output and similarly aggregated public opinion. Approaches in this vein provide relevant insights and uncover a surprising degree of EU responsiveness. Yet, this debate contribution argues that they only insufficiently capture indirect accountability chains and the emerging challenges of public EU politicization and mediatization. We establish the need for procedural perspectives that addresses how the different EU institutions perceive and digest public opinion and subsequently influence it through communication. To further this research agenda, we sketch the contours of a procedural model by highlighting possible variation at the input, throughput and output stages. Going full circle, we suggest, allows us to better understand the responses to public opinion and their wider implications for the societal acceptance of the unfinished supranational polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While national parliaments in the European Union have learned to internalize new opportunities for influence given to them by the Lisbon Treaty, European integration has evolved and places ever more serious demands and constraints on domestic legislatures. Following the euro crisis, key decisions about national macro-economic policies are taken in the European Council and the European Semester. These are the issues traditionally at the heart of both democratic governance and citizens’ concerns. Relating these developments to the key functions national parliaments ought to perform, we develop the normative argument that a redirection of national parliaments’ resources away from less salient matters and particularly the Early Warning Mechanism towards the European Council and European economic governance would be welcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical debate about the effects of politicisation on the democratic legitimacy of the European Union has tended to focus on the potential of conflict between European political parties or member state governments. At the same time, empirical sociological studies demonstrate that controversy about Europe continues to unfold primarily within national public spheres. There is as yet no genuine Europe-wide party system or public debate. This reveals a gap between the normative theoretical assessment of EU politicisation and empirical sociological analysis of this phenomenon. To reconcile this discrepancy, this paper develops three actually-existing trajectories of politicisation: the remote conflict, the international conflict and the domestic conflict. Each trajectory carries unique challenges and opportunities to the democratic legitimacy of the Union. It is argued that the domestic conflict trajectory is most promising from a normative democratic perspective. Paradoxically, this does not necessarily imply a renationalisation of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The politicisation of European governance has become an important subject in debates about the institutional design, day-to-day decision-making and democratic legitimacy of the European Union. This special issue takes stock of this development of politicisation research, including the theoretical development as well as the rapidly expanding body of empirical evidence. It synergises the various perspectives on politicisation of European governance, building on a common understanding of politicisation as a three-dimensional process involving increasing salience, polarisation of opinion and the expansion of actors and audiences involved in EU issues. The introduction outlines the central theoretical and conceptual questions concerning the politicisation of European governance and provides a guiding framework for the contributions to this special issue. The contributions document that a differentiated Europe leads to differentiated politicisation across times, countries and settings. The differentiated patterns, particularly across countries, present profound challenges to the future trajectory of European integration and its democratic legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This contribution assesses the explanatory power of European integration theory for the politicisation of specific European Union (EU) issues in mass media and national parliaments. By comparing debates on the EU budget in the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland, on three different budget negotiations, in newspapers and in plenary parliamentary sessions, a rich picture is presented of how visible the EU is, who communicates and how sense is made of EU issues. The comparative framework allows for the isolation of the effects of different national interests, increasing authority of the EU and institutional operating logics. The findings are that authority best explains the visibility of EU issues as the quantity of communication rises in correspondence with the increased powers of the EU. Institutional operating logics explain best which actors dominate the debates and how sense is made of EU issues. The importance of operating logics in explaining communication patterns draws attention to both parliamentary scrutiny mechanisms and media logics of news value criteria. Yet, national interests, authority and operating logics combined provide the best explanation. Theoretically, it is thus demonstrated that different European integration theories can be combined fruitfully to increase our understanding of how EU issues are politicised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution presents a detailed methodological discussion on the empirical study of political representation. It confronts Saward's conceptualization of the representative claim with the method of claims analysis, developed by Koopmans and Statham. Drawing on Saward, the contribution emphasizes the theoretical need to study the act of representation in the form of claims through which connections between representatives and represented are made. Drawing on Koopmans and Statham, the contribution stresses an empirical focus on public spheres in which claims are located. While theory of representation so far remains overly complex in light of the reality of representation in the public sphere, the empirical analysis of claims ignores theoretically important aspects of representation. The theoretically informed and empirically viable methodological approach of representative claims analysis (RCA) is therefore proposed to facilitate future inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The current political climate in the European Union, referred to as the ‘constraining dissensus’, may place negotiations on the multiannual EU budget centre stage. Media framing of EU budget negotiations as conflict between member states may reinforce the constraining dissensus by resonating with exclusive national identity. In contrast, media emphasis on conflict within or across member states may alleviate the constraining dissensus by strengthening cross-cutting cleavages. This study tests hypotheses about patterns in politicisation of the EU budget in three budgets (Delors II, Agenda 2000, Financial Perspectives 2007–2013), three countries (the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland) and two forums (media and national parliaments). It finds predominant international conflict framing, especially in media. Thus, media coverage of EU budget negotiations likely reinforces the constraining dissensus. However, as debates intensify, the constraining dissensus may be loosened through more pluralist framing in the debates. Further comparative empirical research into the dynamics of politicisation is called for. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the literature on European integration, politicization as concept is often attributed major importance. This article shows how the literature variously discusses the politicization of European Union (EU) institutions, the politicization of EU decision-making processes or the politicization of EU issues. Similarly, the literature attributes three different functions to politicization: it functions to crystallize opposing advocacy coalitions, to raise the question of legitimacy and to alter the course of European integration. Despite this diversity, this article argues we are in fact dealing with an encompassing process. To further our understanding of politicization of European integration, politicization as process is defined as an increase in polarization of opinions, interests or values and the extent to which they are publicly advanced towards policy formulation within the EU. Furthermore, attention is directed to practices of representative claims-making in the public sphere through which relationships of delegation and accountability can be altered in discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks how ex ante and ex post control mechanisms structuring the involvement of national parliaments in European Union (EU) policy-formulation affect the scope of conflict and visibility of parliamentary debates. Based on democratic theory, partisan conflict and high visibility are normatively preferable. The effects of control mechanisms on these two criteria are assessed in a comparative case study of plenary debates in the Danish Folketing and Dutch Tweede Kamer on multiannual EU budgets. This study shows that control mechanisms have direct and indirect effects on the scope of conflict and visibility of debates by linking up to different phases of policy-formulation and media coverage cycles. Danish ex ante mechanisms trigger more partisan, but less visible debates, whereas Dutch ex post mechanisms stimulate highly visible, but intergovernmental debates. The findings thus present a trade-off between partisan conflict on the one hand and visibility on the other hand. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article empirically investigates how media coverage of European Union (EU) policy-formulation affects the involvement of national parliaments in these processes. The literature has variously argued that the involvement of national parliaments in EU policy-formulation is unrelated to media coverage, that media strengthen the hand of backbenchers and opposition or that media reinforce executive dominance. Using a mixed methodology research design for a long- itudinal case study of debates on the EU budget in the Netherlands between 1992 and 2005, this article presents evidence for all three hypotheses, but with clear variations over time. Although institutional arrangements clearly structure parliamentary involvement limiting media effects, its explanatory power decreases as the intensity of debate increases. Limited media coverage reinforces executive dominance whereas extensive media coverage provides a weapon of the weak and strengthens the involvement of parliaments in general, and opposition parties in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]