Can Euroscepticism Contribute to a European Public Sphere? The Europeanization of Media Discourses About Euroscepticism Across Six Countries

The 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections resulting in over one quarter of the available seats going to Eurosceptic party members – the highest number to date. As a result, national media outlets in several Member States reported about the ‘earthquake’, ‘virus’, or ‘rising tide’ of Euroscepticism sweeping across the continent. Despite previous research demonstrating that the media’s coverage of the EU can influence public opinion, the mass media remain an underexplored actor in studies of Euroscepticism. If, as the public sphere literature argues, a unified media discourse about the EU can foster the perception of a European demos, then the media’s coverage of Euroscepticism may provide the type of salient, pan-European narrative conducive for a European public sphere to emerge. The present study investigates this claim by assessing whether national media reporting about Euroscepticism indicates a Europeanized media discourse. We compare the media discourse about Euroscepticism in 2014 across six countries (United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Spain, Sweden, and Denmark), in order to assess the extent to which the mass media’s reporting of Euroscepticism indicates the Europeanization of public spheres. Using a mixed-methods approach combining LDA topic modeling and human coding, we find that approximately 70 per cent of print articles mentioning ‘Euroscepticism’ or ‘Eurosceptic’ are framed in a non-domestic (i.e. European) context. In five of the six cases studied, articles exhibiting a European context are strikingly similar in content, but the British case is an exception. However, coverage of British Euroscepticism drives a Europeanization process in other Member States. Using bivariate logistic regressions, we also identify three variables that significantly correlate with a Europeanized media discourse: newspaper type (tabloid or broadsheet), presence of a strong Eurosceptic party, and relationship to the EU budget (net contributor or receiver).