One conflict, two public spheres, three national debates? Comparing patterns of value conflict over judicial independence in Europe across print media and social media

Conflicts over the European Union’s core democratic values, especially related to the independence of judiciary, have led to a general trend towards democratic backsliding among its member states. In particular, judicial independence is heavily contested in Poland due to the judicial reforms initiated by its national government that are perceived as undemocratic by the EU. In Spain, the independence bid by the regional government of Catalonia has also triggered wide debates over judicial independence after the national courts declared the referendum illegal, ruling in favour of the Spanish state. But without understanding how these debates are structured and framed in the public sphere, we can understand little about how this most fundamental democratic value has been politicised, whether this value conflict resonates across Europe and why it contributes to the general trend towards democratic backsliding in the EU. Hence, we compare the value conflict over independence of judiciary in Germany, Poland and Spain in print media outlets (around 5,800 articles) as well as on the social media platforms Facebook (around 6,400 posts) and Twitter (around 6,100 tweets) from 2019 to 2021. While Poland and Spain are directly affected by this value conflict and show high levels of engagement by a wide range of actors in both traditional and online public spheres (large number of politicians of all partisan interests, journalists, academics and experts, ‘digital influencers’ and other political commentators and the general public), Germany is selected to contrast how the value conflict is debated in a non-affected country, which actors participate in the discourse surrounding the debate, if any, and to what extent the German public sphere on the value of independence of judiciary resembles either the Spanish or the Polish public debate. Though the engagement on the value conflict is minimal and involves much less actors who take part in the debate as opposed to Poland and Spain, we find a higher engagement with the value at the EU level as the German public sphere tends to address the ongoing value conflicts in Spain and Poland in the context of EU, more than issues pertaining at the national level. We rely on both manually coded newspaper data as well as social media data in order to analyse the content and the structure of the mediatized value conflict of judicial independence in the public. Further, our comparison of the tone, civility and degree of populism in the public discourses across the three media environments in three different national contexts addresses the scholarly debate on whether social media has contributed to the democratic decline in the European Union. Our work also contributes to recent advances in cross-media, cross-country and cross-lingual studies of public debates.