Politicizing Europe: the Twitter debate during the 2015 Spanish general elections

Since Maastricht onwards, political conflicts concerning European integration have intensified, mobilizing 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 nation-based welfare states and 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 EU-level policy preferences. 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) vs. low-welfare MS, calling for restrictions to intra-EU mobility. Finally, a fourth tension is opposing core and peripheral MS, and first and foremost payers and beneficiaries of cross-national transfers. National elections represent the ultimate context to investigate the role played by the identified conflicts in shaping public opinion. This study focuses on the online debate during the 2015 Spanish general elections in order to understand how conflict(s) over European integration is structured: to what extent are EU-related issues shaping the electoral debate? Can debates over European integration be reduced to a relatively small number of dimensions? How is contestation related to the left-right cleavage? Is there a significant difference between leaders’ and citizens’ discourses? In order to address our RQs, we employ a mixed-method approach, combining the use of supervised machine-learning (based on Natural Language Processing technology) and qualitative data analysis in order to analyse the electoral debate on Twitter. From a public sphere perspective, EU-politicization and democratization are interlinked in a way that public contestations pose a challenge to executive decision-making, raise democratic standards and trigger processes of public opinion formation. By answering our RQs we will thus be able not only to analyse the content of the electoral debate and its matching with our theoretical expectations, but also to contribute to the study of the European(ized) public sphere.