A Democratic Mirage? Newspaper Coverage of the European Parliament and Its Influence on Public Opinion

The European Parliament (EP) was always seen as having the greatest potential of all European Union institutions to alleviate the so called democratic deficit of the Union and increase the legitimacy of EU politics. After all, it is the only directly elected institution at EU level. Accordingly, it has been empowered, which, however, does not seem to have had the anticipated effect: The European financial crisis has made inequalities painfully evident in the EU and has made citizens question the project more fundamentally than ever before. The last two EP elections have witnessed a fulminant rise of anti-EU forces at both ends of the political spectrum– the same is true for many national elections, too. How come the EP could not help to make citizens embrace EU politics more? The paper tries to find an explanation for this by looking into newspaper contents about the EP based on the insight that journalists bring politics home, select news to be published and suggest evaluations of their own whereby they influence citizens’ attitudes and knowledge about political processes. The analysis focusses on the scope and tone of coverage about the EP and its influence on public opinion about the EU’s parliament in Finland, Germany and the UK during the election periods of 2009 and 2014. Research is based on an extensive content analysis of newspaper articles. Media effects are estimated using a multilevel regression model connecting the dataset with external sources such as the Eurobarometer and the European Election Survey.