Politicizing Attitudes: Opening the Black Box of Politicization

This paper will present the results of an ongoing research building on a comparative design and innovative method. It aims for a better understanding of the differentiated politicization of European integration. Most previous studies in this area study the explanations of politicisation, intending to answer the question: “Why may (de)politicisation of European integration happen?”. We propose to go a step further in the process and ask the following question: “How may (de)politicisation of European integration happen?” Our analysis will focus on national political parties as intermediate factors of (de)politicisation. We are interested in the active role that political actors may play in the dynamic process of (de)politicization. Particularly, the public communication of national parties may have become, to a certain extent, Europeanized in the last years and decades. Parties may talk about the EU during national or European elections campaigns or in their daily public communication. Such discourses on European integration may follow a (de)politicization strategy. Indeed, some parties may prefer the EU issue to be highly salient and politicized in the national debate, while others may prefer the opposite. Focusing on political discourses, we want to open the black box of the process of politicization. Indeed, most previous research intend to study the overall level of politicization of European integration in the public sphere. To do so, they focus on mass media data and analyse these materials through content analysis. However, the specific role of each actor in the political game is largely overlooked in these studies. We therefore introduce the concept of politicizing attitude. A politicizing attitude is a characteristic of an actor’s public behaviour or discourse that may have an influence on the process of European integration politicization. Hence, national political parties may have a politicizing attitude. We will conduct discourse analysis thanks to a quantitative text analysis approach of parties’ discourses in four European countries: Belgium, France, Ireland and UK. We have collected a corpus of party manifestos and daily press releases; such data enables a deeper and richer analysis of the Europeanization of political communication. The two main part of the analysis are the following: a) a dictionary based analysis to highlight the salience of European integration in the parties’ discourses; and b) a scaling model analysis (wordfish) in order to evaluate the degree of polarisation. In conclusion, this paper has two main strength. First, it introduces the concept of politicizing attitudes, which aims to fill a gap in the politicization literature. Second, the methodological approach is original and promising for further research in the field of politicization research. Our main result is the elaboration of a typology of politicizing and depoliticizing attitudes for national political parties.