The (De)politicising Public Communication of Parties on European Integration

This paper presents the results of an ongoing research aiming at analyzing the politicization of European integration in political parties’ communications. 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 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. In order to analyse the politicizing communication of political parties, we build on a comparative design and an innovative method. We have collected party communications in UK, Ireland, Belgium and France during 4 years, between 2015 and 2018. This includes all the press releases and social media contents published by all major parties in these countries during this time. Press releases and social media contents are published very frequently by parties, they therefore allow a fine-grained longitudinal analysis. Moreover, press releases and social media content are specifically written to get media attention, reach public opinion and influence the general debate on a specific issue. Then, quantitative text analysis techniques are used to analyse the data. Dictionary, classification and scaling techniques are performed to estimate the salience and the divergence of discourses about European integration. Finally, we can use these estimations to describe when and how parties talk about the EU and try to explain why they do so. Therefore, the four main elements of our approach are the following: (1) focusing on the politicizing communication of political parties, (2) using parties’ press releases and social media contents as data in order to have a much more fine-grained analysis, (3) analyzing such data through quantitative text analysis, (4) and finally explaining the politicizing communication of parties.