The Evolving Nature of EU integration: Issue embedding in the EP election campaign communication

The degree to which issues around European integration shape political competition has concerned political scientists since the dawn of the European Union. Synonymous with the question of EU salience and politicization, prior research has focused on which political actors are responsible for EU politicization, especially on how pro-European, mainstream parties took over from anti-EU, niche parties the leading role in the EU integration debate. Recently, this tendency was further reinforced at the time of the 2019 EP elections with the emergence of an EP party group, Renew Europe, campaigning on a coherent and strong Europhile platform. In addition, complete opposition toward the EU has been replaced with demands for reform in the EU, presenting new challenges for parties and candidates. We argue that in addition to increasing EU issue salience, these issues also broadened in scope, resulting in an increased embedding into other political issues. While mainstream candidates uniformly broadened the scope of EU issues, candidates of challenger parties (e.g. Green and anti-EU) focused on a restricted embedding, linking EU integration to their core political issues owned within the national political arena, such as immigration and environment. We rely on an original data source that consists of the Twitter communication of candidates for the 2014 and 2019 EP elections across all EU Member States. We use a combination of human coding and machine learning to identify the issue content of this communication and offer both within- and between candidate analyses to support our main claims.