Politics without Parliaments? Parliaments in EU Politicization through National Media

Are parliaments a political arena on which politicizing actors capitalize to advance their publicizing strategy? Plainly, when parliament discusses Europe, is anyone listening? (Auel and Raunio 2014). This paper relies on a large n study of media outputs to asses to which extent EU related outputs incorporate the parliamentary space. To do so, a corpus of press contents has been downloaded and processed. The data has been treated to obtain a database with metadata and content information for each output. I rely on a ‘bag of words’ methodology and manual supervision to create samples of EU related outputs, and within them identify those including parliaments. The main results are: first: Different media systems deliver a similar number of media outputs containing parliaments. The main difference strives in what affects their production, with the UK being more sensitive to plenary activity than France and Germany. Second, the increase of monitoring capacity in France raised the frequency of parliamentary reporting. Third, the connection between EU in parliament and press is generally weak, and is confirmed only when government acts in the parliamentary space or when constitutional issues are discussed. Otherwise, EU presence in parliament has to be at extraordinarily high levels in order for media to capture it. Fourth, in Germany, the correspondence between plenary treatment of specific policy areas and press following EU initiatives in the same area is not robust.