Framing Europe on Twitter: Party Leaders, Party Competition and the Substantive Politicisation of EU Integration

Research on the politicisation of European integration has primarily focused on salience, polarisation and actor expansion, while paying far less attention to the substantive frames through which political actors make sense of the EU in their day-to-day communication. This article shifts the focus from whether and how much the EU is politicised to how it is framed, and by whom. We examine elite-level communication on Twitter to analyse the prevalence, trajectories and determinants of EU framing by party leaders. Empirically, we draw on an original dataset of 181,615 tweets posted between 2007 and 2022 by leaders of all politically relevant parties in six member states (Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia). EU-related tweets (N = 14,529) are identified through a combination of automated retrieval and manual content coding. Building on framing theory, we employ a deductive–inductive strategy to identify five EU-related master frames – economic, cultural, sovereignty, democracy and security – which are coded as present/absent at the tweet level using manual quantitative content analysis. The analysis proceeds in two steps. First, we describe the temporal evolution and cross-national distribution of EU framing, both in terms of overall presence and of the relative salience of the five frames. Second, we estimate a series of time-series cross-sectional models with country and year fixed effects to assess how ideological positions (left–right, GAL–TAN, pro-/anti-integration), party characteristics (radical right status, party size, government participation) and contextual factors (Eurozone, refugee, Brexit and Covid-19 crises) structure the probability that EU-related tweets contain framing in general and specific frames in particular. Our findings show that elite Twitter communication constitutes a highly selective and contingent arena for the framing of Europe. EU framing in party leaders’ tweets remains rare: around 85% of EU-related tweets contain none of the five frames. Economic and security perspectives dominate framing, while the sovereignty, democracy and especially cultural frames emphasised in previous research appear only sporadically. Framing is strongly associated with party politics variables. Leaders of parties located towards the right and TAN poles, and especially radical right and Eurosceptic parties, are systematically more likely to frame the EU, particularly in sovereignty and democracy terms, whereas centrist actors engage in economic and security framing more selectively. Contextual effects are conditional: Brexit stands out as the only crisis robustly associated with heightened framing, whereas the Eurozone, refugee and Covid-19 crises exert weaker or inconsistent effects. Contrary to expectations that Central and Eastern Europe constitutes a distinct stronghold of sovereigntist discourse, we find no significant regional divergence from the German benchmark. Overall, the article demonstrates that the politicisation of European integration on Twitter is not only limited in scope but also substantively skewed towards pragmatic economic and security narratives, with more conflictual identity and sovereignty frames remaining the preserve of a narrow set of partisan actors.