Sounds of Silence? Parliamentary Communication Activities in EU Affairs and their Coverage by the Media

Within the EU, the opacity of policy-making processes and the resulting lack of accountability of decision-makers have been defined as core problems of democratic legitimacy in both academic and political debates. Here, it has been argued that national parliaments are in a unique position to contribute to making EU politics more democratic by communicating EU issues to their citizens. Yet given the scarcity of (comparative) empirical studies on how parliaments fulfil their communication function in EU affairs, we still know too little about whether and to what degree they actually live up to these expectations. Moreover, although national parliaments can, of course, communicate EU issues more directly, for example though the publication of activities or documents via websites or parliamentary TV channels, most citizens experience politics mainly through the media. The aim of the paper is therefore twofold: The first aim is to investigate whether and how national parliaments fulfil their communication function in EU affairs and to explain the observed variation. In a second step, it then investigates whether parliamentary communication activities are covered by the national media and thus have a better chance of actually reaching the citizens. Here, the paper also investigates to what extent we can observe a Europeanisation of the media coverage on parliamentary communication. For the analysis, the paper draws on quantitative and qualitative data on parliamentary communication activities in Austria, Finland, France, Germany Poland, Spain and the UK between 2010 and 2013, as well as a content analysis of three newspapers in each member state (two quality papers and one tabloid) over the same period.