The Influence of News Media Blame Attributions on Public EU Support

The European Union (EU) has often been used as a scapegoat for domestic political parties to put the blame for unpleasant decision-making onto European level politics. In general, news media provide the necessary means to spread messages of blaming EU politics to a wide audience. So, if national parties are able to confer the EU scapegoat message to the voters via the media, such blame shifting may have detrimental consequences for public support for (further) European integration. Following this line of reasoning, this study asks two interrelated questions. First, to what degree is blame shifting towards the EU level present in mass mediated discourse and who are the key domestic players in this? Second, how does exposure to blame shifting in the mass media affect voters’ attitudes towards European integration? We take into account the possible contingency of such media effects, with media impact potentially depending on the messenger (e.g. type of national politician), the recipient and contextual variation. We analyze these questions by looking at blame attribution of the economic and financial crisis and its effect on support for European integration. We draw on a data set that combines media content analysis and voter surveys in all 27 EU-Member States around the 2009 European Parliament (EP) elections. The media data come from analyses of newspapers and television news in the three weeks prior to the election, and identify economic issues and evaluations, and the preferred level of governance in handling these issues. These are combined with analyses of actors on the level of single news stories. The voter data include detailed measures of media exposure that allow integrating the findings of the content analysis as well as indicators of EU support.