Political Communication in European Parliamentary Elections

Michaela Maier, Jesper Strömbäck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409411321
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317078906
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Written by a leading team of internationally distinguished political communication scholars, this book offers the most comprehensive account on comparative political communication research in the context of European Parliamentary elections to date. Divided into four sections, experts begin by tracing the historical and political background of European Parliamentary elections, paying close attention to trends in turnout and the changing institutional role of the European Parliament (EP). Focusing mainly on the 2009 elections and using original data throughout, the next two sections are devoted to campaign communication strategies and the overall media coverage of EP elections in both established and newly-accessioned members of the European Union. The concluding section focuses on the macro- and micro-level effects of European parliamentary campaigns in a comparative perspective to illustrate how campaign strategies and media coverage were received by voters in EU member states. This insightful account on the interaction between political actors, the media, and voters allows readers to develop a global understanding of political and media system interdependencies and on comparative political communication research more generally. Essential reading to students and scholars in political science, media studies, European politics, and political communication, as well as policy makers within the European Union.

PART I
Perspectives on the European Parliamentary Elections

Chapter 1
Political Communication and Election Campaigns for the European Parliament

Jesper Strömbäck, Michaela Maier, and Lynda Lee Kaid

Introduction

Without political communication, there is no democracy. Democracy and political communication are inextricably linked, on the local as well as the regional, national, and transnational level. As suggested by Blumler and Gurevitch (1975: pp. 167–8):

If politics is about power, the holder’s possession of and readiness to exercise it must in some manner be conveyed to those expected to respond to it. […] If politics is about the legitimation of supreme authority, then the values and procedural norms of regimes have to be symbolically expressed, and the acts of government have to be justified in broad popular terms. And if politics is about choice, then information flows clarifying alternative policy options must circulate to those concerned with decisions, whether as their shapers or as consumers of their consequences.

Similarly, if politics is about popular participation or the representation of the will of the people, then participation ultimately consists of, while the representation of people requires, communication.

This is true both between and during election campaigns, although the importance of political communication may be even more obvious during campaigns than otherwise. Not only do political parties and candidates increase their efforts at communicating with the electorate, directly or through advertising or the news media, but the media devote greater attention to politics during election campaigns. In addition, the outcome of political communication may be particularly consequential, as it will help shape people’s votes, which in turn will decide the allocation of power and policymaking over the next term.

Political communication and election research have consequently been closely intertwined ever since the 1940s and the publication of the classic People’s Choice study (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet, 1948), and reviews suggest that election campaigns remain the single most important theme in political communication research (Blumler and McQuail, 2001; Graber, 2005).

Most of this research has, however, focused on the national level and national elections, while political communication in local, regional, and transnational election campaigns has been largely neglected. In addition, most research is comprised of single-country studies, at times even focusing on a single election. Thus, there is more or less extensive research on, for example, how the media cover election campaigns (Farnsworth and Lichter, 2011; Patterson, 1993), how political parties and candidates campaign and market themselves (Lees-Marshment, 2001; Lilleker, Jackson, and Scullion, 2006), the relationship and interaction between political parties and candidates on the one hand and journalists on the other (Skewes, 2007), and on the content and character of campaign discourse and political advertising (Benoit, 2007; Kaid, 2004). The number of studies investigating broader aspects of political communication at other levels than the national and cross-national, is limited (but see Kaid and Holtz-Bacha, 2006; Lees-Marshment, Strömbäck, and Rudd, 2010; Plasser and Plasser, 2002; Strömbäck and Kaid, 2008). In this respect, political communication research decidedly treats national elections as first-order elections, and all other elections as second-order national elections (Reif and Schmitt, 1980).

The concept of second-order national elections was originally developed by Reif and Schmitt (1980) who suggest that “the most important aspect of second-order elections is that there is less at stake”, (p. 9) particularly with respect to the allocation of power at the national level and in terms of government formation. More specifically, they hypothesize that second-order national elections are characterized by:

a. lower level of participation,

b. brighter prospects for small and new political parties,

c. higher percentage of invalidated ballots,

d. government party losses, and that:

the more national media are oriented towards first-order arena issues and sources of information, the more their contribution to the electoral mobilization depends upon the attention first-order politicians pay to the specific second-order elections (Reif and Schmitt, 1980: p. 14).

Typical examples of second-order national elections are local, mid-term, and, most importantly in this context, European Parliamentary elections.

That political communication research tends to treat all elections apart from national ones as second-order elections is problematic, not only because elections at other geographical levels are politically important, but also because political communication is always shaped and constrained by factors located at different levels of analysis. If political communication, broadly speaking, refers to “the exchange of symbols and messages between political actors and institutions, the general public, and news media that are the product of or have consequences for the political system” (McLeod, Kosicki, and McLeod, 1994: pp. 125–6), then a proper understanding of political communication needs to take into account individual as well as organizational or institutional and systemic levels of analysis, and the linkages between the different levels of analysis (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1975; Chaffee, 1975; Hallin and Mancini, 2004).

The implication is that political communication during elections campaigns at the local level is shaped by partly different factors than political communication at the regional or national level, and that political communication during election campaigns at these different levels is shaped by systemic factors that vary across countries. It also means that political communication during election campaigns at the European level presumably is shaped by factors that are only partly accounted for in political communication theories with their origins in research on national political communication.

The Hybrid Character of Elections to the European Parliament

In fact, research on political communication during election campaigns for the European Parliament (EP) is particularly interesting and important because these elections have a hybrid character: they are both national and European at the same time. These elections are about the same representative European body, and to some extent the campaigns and elections take place under rules that are common across countries. For example, the date range for Election Day is the same across countries, and a proportional electoral system is now mandatory although there otherwise exist great variations across the member states in the electoral systems used in national elections. In some respects, these elections are thus decidedly European. At the same time, research has repeatedly shown that parties and candidates as well as the media and voters tend to treat EP elections as second-order national elections (Kaid, 2008; Maier and Tenscher, 2006; Marsh, 1998; Reif and Schmitt, 1980; van der Brug and van der Eijk, 2007), despite the fact that the powers of the European Parliament have increased significantly across time.

The implications of this state of affairs are many, but not least important in this context is that political communication during election campaigns for the European Parliament is about European political communication in two intertwined respects: they are for a European body, and they take place across European countries under the influence and constraints of partly similar, partly different factors at the individual, institutional, and systemic levels of analysis. Among other things, this means not only that theories and lessons learned about political communication at the national level cannot be assumed to hold also for political communication during European Parliamentary election campaigns. It also means that these election campaigns offer an excellent opportunity for cross-national, comparative research.

There are at least four reasons to expand research on political communication during election campaigns for the European Parliament. First, these elections are important and have become even more important over time as the powers of the European Parliament have expanded. Second, these elections offer excellent opportunities to explore the linkages between the European and the national character of these elections and, third, to expand cross-national, comparative research. Fourth, these elections allow the testing of theories originally developed within the context of national elections and national political communication in a multi-cultural context.

A Brief History of Political Communication Research on EP Elections

The first direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979 brought forward promising research efforts. The most important endeavor was spearheaded by Jay Blumler and colleagues, who developed a program seeking to analyze the media campaigns and their effects on voters in all, by then nine, member states on the basis of a multi-method research design (Blumler, 1983). However, after this first comprehensive initiative, research on EP election campaigns fell off the agenda of most political communication scholars. For a while it seemed to be lost in reverie, a status which recalls a saying of the former Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson, who once said that elections to the European Parliament were “as exciting as kissing your sister” (Nord and Strömbäck, 2006: p. 191). Not only did parties and politicians but the media and voters at large treat EP elections as second-order national elections. Political communication scholars largely did so as well.

It was not until the 1999 EP elections that this situation started to change, and the last three elections to the European Parliament have been investigated more thoroughly than any other EP elections since 1979. Most political communication research efforts have been devoted to studies on how the media cover these election campaigns, spearheaded by a team of researchers at the University of Amsterdam (de Vreese, 2003a, 2003b; de Vreese, Banducci, Semetko, and Boomgaarden, 2006; de Vreese, Lauf, and Peter, 2007; see also Kevin, 2003). Even more political communication research was devoted to the 2004 EP elections, with three books published covering not only the media coverage of these election campaigns, but also campaign strategies and messages, and campaign effects (Maier and Tenscher, 2006; Kaid, 2008; van der Brug and van der Eijk, 2007).

This development is very positive, and this volume seeks to expand on this previous research and to explore both longitudinal and cross-national patterns in the behaviors of the three main sets of actors that are always at the center of political communication during election campaigns:

a. parties and candidates,

b. mass media, and

c. the electorate.

More specifically, the goal of this book is first, to expand research on political communication during EP campaigns in general, taking into account and with a particular focus on the most recent elections held in 2009; second, to investigate the behaviors of all three main sets of actors in European election campaigns, and more specifically campaign strategies and messages as well as the media coverage and campaign effects; and third, to extend comparative and theory-driven research on political communication during EP-campaigns.

Book Outline

This book consists of four parts, following our understanding of political communication as an interactive and interdependent communication process between political parties and candidates, the media, and voters. The first part is titled Perspectives on the European Parliamentary Elections and includes this introductory chapter and The Legal and Institutional Framework of the 2009 European Parliament Elections in the Shadow of the Lisbon Treaty. In this second chapter, Clifford A. Jones describes and analyzes the evolution of and the legal and institutional framework of the European Parliament between 1952 and 2009. Among other things, the chapter shows that the EP, once known as the Assembly and “commonly regarded as an essentially powerless debating society” has evolved considerably and that it now holds great influence in policymaking within the EU. According to Jones, “the powers and functions of the EP have strengthened and widened to the point that the EP approaches the status of a full partner in a bicameral legislature”. Jones also tracks the evolution of European-level parties and political foundations, suggesting that over time there is a movement towards a more cohesive European level of party politics.

As in all elections, the behavior of voters in EP elections at large cannot be perceived in isolation from the behaviors of political parties and candidates or of the media. The second part of this book thus focuses on Party Campaign Communication Strategies. This part includes five chapters.

In the first of these (Chapter 3), Tom Moring, Juri Mykkänen, Lars Nord, and Marie Grusell investigate how political parties and candidates in Finland and Sweden campaigned for the European Parliament in 2009. The chapter is titled Campaign Professionalization and Political Structures: A Comparative Study of Election Campaigning in Finland and Sweden in the EP Elections. As suggested by the title, their study builds on theories on campaign professionalization. This is an area where there is only limited comparative research (but see Plasser and Plasser, 2002), with most research focusing on national elections. Thus, this chapter fills a gap in the literature by not only expanding and testing theories on political campaign professionalization, but also by applying these comparatively to EP elections. Among other things, this chapter shows that the party-centered theory of campaign professionalization has “a great deal of explanatory power”, and that the Swedish EP campaigns were more professionalized than the Finnish EP campaigns.

In Chapter 4, Lilia Raycheva and Jolán Róka investigate campaign communication in two of the new members states of the EU, Bulgaria and Hungary. The chapter is titled Similarities and Differences in Transformational Democracies: EP Campaigns in Bulgaria and Hungary. Aside from describing and comparing the political situation in the two countries, and thus contextualizing the 2009 EP election campaigns, the chapter investigates television ads and posters of the most important parties in each country. Among other things, the chapter shows that the campaigns focused on national issues and actors rather than on European concerns, thus confirming that the EP election was treated as a second-order national election. The authors also suggest that there was a trend of “obscuring the boundaries between the serious and entertaining”, which, in addition to the lack of a debate related to European issues, undermined voters’ opportunities to cast informed votes.

Chapter 5 focuses on campaign strategies in two member states which are known for their skeptical attitudes towards EU-membership, namely Great Britain and the Czech Republic. The chapter is written by Ralph Negrine, Vaclav Stetka, and Marta Fialová and is suggestively titled Campaigning in but not for Europe: European Campaign Strategies in the UK and the Czech Republic. The authors compare EP election campaigns in a generally Euroskeptical environments and under very special circumstances: At the time of the Czech presidency of the EU and the so-called “expenses scandal” in Britain. These were two very dissimilar situations that might have had one common effect: that Euroskeptical voices were not in the best position to campaign too provocatively. For Great Britain the analysis shows that the fear of voters’ reactions might even have enforced parties not to put the EU too much on the agenda, but to treat it as second-order. In the Czech Republic, the major parties used the EP campaign as a prelude to the national elections in a strongly negative and personalized campaign, but EU issues were only found on the agenda of hard-Euroskeptic fringe parties. Altogether, the authors come to the conclusion that “voters in both countries were thereby caught between two most prominent campaign strategies, which could be named ‘Campaigning without Europe’ and ‘Campaigning against Europe’”.

While the two preceding chapters compare the situations in two countries, Chapter 6 broadens the analysis to compare televised advertising used in the 2009 EP elections in nine countries. The chapter is titled Televised Advertising in the 2009 European Parliamentary Elections: Comparing Campaign Strategies and Videostyles and is written by Lynda Lee Kaid, Silke Adam, Michaela Maier, Matthias Balzer, Rosa Berganza, Carlos Jalali, Ralph Negrine, Lilia Raycheva, Jolán Róka, Andreas R.T. Schuck, Vaclav Stetka, and Claes de Vreese. The chapter argues that televised advertising by the parties constitutes one of the most important channels of communication, particularly in “a low-information electoral environment which may enhance the potential impact of advertising messages”. Theoretically, the chapter builds on the concept of videostyle, which considers the verbal and the nonverbal content as well as the production techniques used in televised ads. The chapter shows that there were both similarities and differences across countries. One of the important similarities was that domestic issues trumped European issues, although European politicians were very prominent as main actors in the tele...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables and Appendices
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• PART I PERSPECTIVES ON THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS
• PART II PARTY CAMPAIGN COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES
• PART III MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS
• PART IV EFFECTS OF CAMPAIGNS ON EU CITIZENS
• Index