Examining EU Public Legitimation from Bottom-Up Perspective: The Case of the Refugee Crisis Discussed on Czech Television

As the public contestation of EU issues increases, the EU's public communication faces new challenges. The communication deficit no longer stems from lack of politicization; instead, the latest issue is to publicly legitimize the contested policies. National leaders often refrain from endorsing EU positions, resorting to scapegoating and blame-shifting. Thus, the EU finds itself in need of unprecedented self-legitimisation. This paper discusses the concept of EU public legitimation, building on recent procedural approaches to legitimacy, accountability, and rhetorical responsiveness. We regard public legitimation as such public communication that allows for these practices: to explain and justify, but also to listen to judgments and answer questions. The paper focuses on television broadcasting, which remains the primary media source along with the internet. Diverging from approaches focusing on strategic EU communication, this paper takes a bottom-up perspective. The quantitative content analysis method of public claims analysis (PCA) is used to analyse the national broadcasting and identify traces of EU public legitimation. This method aligns with the perspective of regular citizens who depend on domestic broadcasting and do not search for EU communication elsewhere. This novel methodology is demonstrated through a case study of public debate on the refugee crisis on Czech television from April 2015 to March 2016, analysing a sample of 2374 claims. This case meets two criteria: high level of EU politicisation, and clashing stances of EU leaders and national representatives, culminating in the outvoting of the Czech Republic during the September 2015 Council meeting on the relocation mechanism. Findings reveal that EU legitimation practices were exceedingly rare in the studied case. Despite frequent critique of EU leaders and institutions in the national public sphere, European actors have scarcely engaged in any public legitimation practices to allow judgments to be heard, questions to be answered, or dialogue to take place.