Why Citizens, Media and the EU?
Over the past decades, the problem of the attitudes of various political actors towards the process of European integration has attracted growing attention on the part of scholars. It has become clear that the pace of integration proposed from the top and some of its side effects—fiscal austerity, transnational redistribution, economic insecurity, internal migration—have become difficult to accept for significant constituencies in Europe. The medium- to long-term evolutionary trend of the European Union (EU) system of supranational governance (compounding a major expansion of its territorial sphere, the build-up of an increasingly articulated institutional system and the accumulation of broader policy competencies) has given rise to a multitude of problems concerning the EU legitimacy among the public (Hooghe and Marks 2009; Kriesi et al. 2008; Risse 2010). In this perspective, this volume investigates the impact of the media on citizens’ attitudes towards Europe. We consider this important because the information channelled through the media becomes part of the cognitive shortcuts adopted by citizens to understand reality, including the European actuality. In the past, empirical analyses of media representations of Europe have prioritised a descriptive approach, particularly how the EU and the integration process are discursively construed in the mass media. The survey of the EU member states that we present in the volume moves this a step forward. Through an explanatory approach, we investigate the impact of the media on citizens and produce a comprehensive account of how different media influence individual attitudes towards the EU. The novelty of our approach lies specifically in its focus on the ex post effects of media on consumers.
We argue that nowadays the role of the media in shaping public support for and opposition to the process of European integration has become fundamental. In contrast, scholarly attention has mainly focused on the personal characteristics of citizens based on cognitive abilities, socio-economic interests, political leaning, feelings of identity and attachment to their nation to explain their attitudes towards the EU (Sanders et al. 2012a, 2012b). However, as long as the impact of the EU on daily life becomes increasingly tangible, citizens not only need to rely on pre-existing motivations in order to be able to assign credit and blame to the EU, they also need to gather information about its current policies and trajectory. This is normally done through media use, the main source citizens turn to for news about current events. The complexity of political life and its strong dependence on transnational forces and on multilevel governance challenge the cognitive capability of citizens to understand politics. In the complex and heavily interdependent European context, media may represent the cognitive shortcuts that citizens use to make sense of a fast-changing reality. As argued by Hooghe and Marks (2004), media cue citizens in their views about Europe rather substantially.
Surprisingly, despite the media’s broad influence on popular understanding and perceptions about politics having become a firm point in the literature, their impact on attitudes towards the EU has been rather neglected in the empirical literature. Interest in media representations about the EU has actually grown together with the number of scholarly works recently published. However, these works investigate the ways media evaluate the EU and the process of European integration, or how contestation over Europe develops in the media (see Bayley and Williams 2012; Bijsmans and Altides 2007; de Wilde et al. 2013; Machill et al. 2006). But the direct impact of the media on popular support for the EU has only rarely been analysed empirically (see de Vreese 2007). Scholarly research in this field is actually quite rare, with the exception of only a limited number of works (de Vreese 2007; Hooghe and Marks 2004; Lubbers and Scheepers 2010) and of a recent interest for the media impact on voters’ behaviour in the European elections (van Spanje and de Vreese 2014). Furthermore, the other studies that have adopted an approach similar to ours in the volume are less developed in scope, or they need to be updated to the most recent developments about citizens’ stances and use of the media. Finally, these studies often consider the influence of the media within broad explanatory models, whereas we place the media at the core of our research design (while other factors are considered only for the purpose of controlling the robustness of our hypotheses and results).
Unfortunately, due to the inadequate attention hitherto paid by the literature, knowledge of the impact of the media on public opposition to and support for the EU is confined to some limited, often obsolete, analyses that do not really reflect the current situation. This is a gap we intend to fill with our book, through fresh analyses of recent data and of all EU member states. Filling this gap in the literature is even more urgent today, as support for the EU process has declined sharply in Europe, while the advent of new media has drastically expanded the information outlets available to citizens. The volume integrates these two recent phenomena and analyses their connections in a systematic way. This is done in various steps. First, trends in public support for the EU and in the use of (traditional and new) media are examined. Second, through use of explanatory analyses based on multivariate modelling, Euroscepticism is explained from the point of view of media impact on citizens’ attitudes towards the EU. Third, a clustering of countries based on media use and citizens’ attitudes towards the EU is defined. Fourth, we differentiate the impact of various media sources (including the Internet and social media) on citizens’ views on the EU.
The results of our investigation show that the media have a definite, but differentiated, impact on citizens’ attitudes. A broad use of media positively influences support for the EU, as it refines citizens’ cognitive capabilities and understanding of the European reality. However, prevalent use of online media serves to channel more critical attitudes and disaffection for the EU. This is particularly true when citizens make extensive use of social media, especially if these are used to get politically involved. The new media often take a critical posture on many issues; in the book we prove that this is also true with respect to Europe and that their extensive use, especially in certain countries and cohorts of citizens, has contributed to making the European public more inclined to Euroscepticism. We also consider recent time developments to examine whether there is a dynamic aspect to the phenomenon under analysis.
The volume presents the most comprehensive survey to date of citizens’ use of media and attitudes towards the EU. This makes the volume relevant for specialists of the EU and students of media and public opinion. At the same time, the research that we present should be of interest to anyone whose work or research has an emphasis on Europe’s present and future developments. The EU is increasingly subject to many forms of critique and opposition to its policies, but also against its institutions, decision-making mode and basis for existence. Many citizens have started to question the usefulness of their own country’s membership within the EU. Hence, nowadays the EU process shows an unfinished yet contested character. The recent Eurosceptic turn in public opinion, together with the populist slant in political representation across Europe, makes the future of the EU more uncertain. In this context, we show that the new media may prove particularly insidious for EU legitimation among the public. If the lack of popular backing for the EU is already problematic today, it may constitute an even more pressing emergency in the future. As media are an important component of the fabric of society and the new media perform an increasingly important function, it is therefore important to understand their impact on public perceptions about the EU.
Mapping Public Attitudes Towards the EU and the Use of the Media
The volume aims to map citizens’ attitudes towards the EU in light of their media consumption. On the one hand, we examine citizens’ positions on two main components of the EU as a political system, namely, its representation structure and policy competences. On the other hand, we examine how these positions change in relation to the different media diets of individuals. This is done through empirical analysis of the entire EU, but we also take a close look at variations by country. Similarly to other recent works that have adopted a public sphere approach for the study of Euroscepticism—which we consider an urgent European phenomenon—we focus on the public character of the political conflict over the EU. Whereas most available studies in the field adopt an approach based either on public opinion or the media, we examine the connections between these two fundamental actors of the public sphere. Public support and trust in the capacity of EU institutions and collective leadership to effectively resolve problems have seriously declined over the last few years among citizens. We show that this is at least partly dependent on citizens’ exposure to different media outlets.
Since the media impact on political contestation of European integration relies heavily on the different developments of the national media systems, the fragmentation of media systems in the EU is a fundamental aspect that we take into consideration in our analyses. Although our selected targets of contestation of the EU—representation and policy—are similar across the member states, our drivers of contestation vary. Thus, our mapping is attentive to country-specific variations in media consumption in the different European countries. In particular, we show that it is exactly where the use of online media has expanded the most in recent times that public Euroscepticism has increased most significantly.
The main contribution of this work to the existing literature consists of an accurate mapping of mass-mediated citizens’ attitudes towards the EU. Our research design allows for observing convergence and divergence in public attitudes across member states, as well as across different uses of the available media outlets. We believe that understanding the extent to which commonalities and differences exist among member states, as well as among various media consumers, is extremely important for the future of the EU. Whereas divergent patterns of attitudes would require from the EU a greater effort to meet the demands of citizens in order to guarantee its legitimacy and continued existence, convergence would provide more unitary collective goals in the integration process that the EU could more coherently target. Hence, the accurate investigation of the current tensions between citizens, media and the EU governance system can be useful to providing advice on remedial actions that could be adopted at the national or European level to make these relationships less tense and to appease the discontent of public opinion. In this perspective, we show in particular that improving the online communication tools of advocates of the European integration process has become an urgent problem. Moreover, we demonstrate that for the EU to be able to reach out to those segments of the public that are most active online is also necessary in order to secure its legitimacy with this emerging component of public opinion.
Structure of the Book
The research that we present in the volume is based on an intensive analysis of the Eurobarometer data collected by TNS Opinion on behalf of the European Commission to gauge the views of European citizens on various aspects of the integration process. These fresh data represent a source of information that is recent and keenly awaited by the academic community, which we have analysed to produce the most updated portrait of the European public on att...