Politicizing Europe: The Twitter Debate during the 2015 Spanish General Elections

Since Maastricht onwards, political conflicts concerning European integration have intensified and mobilized a wide range of actors in a global process of politicization of the EU. The consequent restructuring of political conflicts has been mainly driven by the exacerbation of the existing tension between NBWS and the process of economic integration. In particular, four lines of conflicts have been identified as structuring the political debate. The first one is ascribable to the traditional left-right cleavage, opposing market-making and market-correcting policy preferences at the EU level. The second one outlines a contrast between the defence of national social sovereignty and the increasing role of EU conditionality. The third conflict opposes high welfare Member States (MS) vis-à-vis low welfare MS, calling for restrictions to intra-EU mobility. Finally, a fourth tension is opposing EU core and peripheral MS, and first and foremost payers and beneficiaries of cross-national transfers and financial assistance. National general elections represent the ultimate context to investigate the role played by those conflicts in shaping public opinion. In this case study on the 2015 Spanish general elections we aim at understanding: • RQ1: to what extent are EU-related issues shaping the electoral debate? (Vertical Europeanization) • RQ2: to what extent are citizens from other MS participating to the online debate around the Spanish elections? (Horizontal Europeanization) In order to address our RQs, we employ a supervised machine-learning approach in order to quantitatively analyse the electoral debate on Twitter, through the use of the Natural Language Processing software Method52.