Talk is Cheap: Selective Politicization of EU Dimension in the 2014 EP Elections

In this paper we develop an approach that captures the degree of European issue politicization by relying on the social media communication around the 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections. Using this approach will allow us to investigate if the Eurozone crisis and the recent institutional changes (i.e. the introduction of the Spitzenkandidaten) brought forward the prominence of the EU dimension of political competition at the time of these elections, thus challenging the second order nature of EP elections. By looking at the Twitter communication of the MEP candidates and the response they get from the public we are able to differentiate between the three main components of EU politicization: salience, conflict, and expansion to the public, while we investigate the factors that encourage their development. First, using a combination of human coding and machine learning we categorize the content of the Twitter communication separating EU issue relevant content from that referring simply to the EP elections as an event. Next, we analyze sentiment polarization conditional on the content areas, and finally we look at the extent of repeated or quoted content (re-tweets) and direct responses from the public, in order to measure the level of expansion. We show that while candidates make substantial references to EP elections and EP elections campaign, this does not contribute towards increasing the salience of the EU dimension. Furthermore, the other two important aspects that would allow moving beyond the second-order model, i.e. conflict, and expansion to the public of the EU dimension, are also still largely underdeveloped. To sum up, we show that in three out of the four countries analyzed in this paper, i.e. Greece, Spain and the UK, the overall politicization of the EU dimension is generally very low, with some partial evidence of EU politicization in Germany.