Giving or Taking Voice: Representative Claims and Group Appeals in the EU’s Multi-level Public Sphere

Abstract

How do political actors give voice to or take voice from constituencies in the EU’s multi-level public sphere? Research on representative claims and group appeals has demonstrated that political actors draw attention to certain constituencies, mention groups to indicate alignment or acknowledgment, claim to speak for constituencies, signal with policy commitments, and render other constituencies absent by omitting, downplaying or attacking them. However, to what extent do these patterns vary in the European Parliament, EU official discourse from the Commission and Council and party manifestos more broadly? The aim of this panel is to bring together scholarship examining the supply side of political communication in order to better understand under which conditions group appeals and representative claims are more likely to emerge and when they serve to be inclusive or exclusive, e.g., to give or take voice. We expect variation to reflect calculations about legitimation strategies, governance and territorial scope (local – supranational), policy and ideological commitments: some actors amplify minoritized voices while others construct groups as threats or deny them legitimate representation. Drawing on research analyzing parliamentary debates, party manifestos, and public discourse in the EU multi-level system, the contributions trace how political actors refer to constituencies across the public sphere in the European Union. The panel contributions use a diverse set of methods, from qualitative content analysis to computational text classification, to examine group appeals and representative claims across EU institutions and party manifestos. They analyse diverse groups, from structurally defined populations such as economic, territorial, or age groups to more loosely constructed identities, revealing both group diversity and group-specific patterns. More generally, this panel aims to collect new theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights into studying how group appeals and representative claims intersect in the communication domain of representation, demonstrating that studying who speaks to, for and about whom remains essential to understanding representation in contemporary representative democracies.

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