Betw. Europe a. the Citizens - An Analysis of Parliamentary Communication in EU Affairs

Over the last 20 years, the role of national parliaments in EU affairs has gained considerable academic attention. Much of the literature, however, has focused on parliamentary scrutiny and control in EU affairs. What tends to be generally overlooked, is that the parliamentary communication function is at least as important in EU politics as the control function. Democratic legitimacy depends on a vibrant public debate on political solutions and alternatives to allow citizens to make informed political (electoral) choices and to exercise democratic control. Within the EU, it is precisely the opacity of policy-making processes and the lack of public discourse that have been defined as core problems of democratic legitimacy. Here, parliaments have the potential to provide an ideal arena for the deliberation of important European issues and thus to help overcome the much-lamented distance between European policy processes and the citizens. Yet despite their central relevance for the legitimacy of European politics, the parliamentary communication function remains so far under researched. Based on the assumption that citizens experience politics mainly through the media, the research project will therefore investigate both, the communication efforts of national parliaments in EU politics and their coverage in the national media. The comparative analysis will combine quantitative and qualitative data on parliamentary communication activities with a media content analysis, supplemented by interviews with members of parliament and journalists. The analysis will be carried out using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). The aim of the project is to make a theoretical as well as empirical contribution to the debate on the role of national parliaments in the European system of multilevel governance. Furthermore, it will contribute to three main areas of research. First, it contributes to literature on Europeanisation, a concept used primarily to examine the impact of European integration on national policies. It not only investigates how parliaments deal with European matters, but also assesses the salience of EU affairs in national legislatures and for parliamentary parties. With the additional focus on the national media coverage it also adds to our understanding of the Europeanisation of public discourse. Hence it will develop a better understanding of the extent to which domestic polities are Europeanised. Second, this project will contribute to debates on the democratic deficit of the EU by investigating whether national parliaments play their part in legitimising EU politics or whether this deficit is not at least partly "homemade". Indeed, if national parliaments neglect the function of communicating EU affairs, they contribute further to the opacity of EU governance. And finally, the project aims at increasing our knowledge in the area of legislative studies more generally. So far, there is very little comparative research on the communication function of parliaments and the role of the media therein.

Democratic legitimacy depends on a vibrant public debate on political solutions and alternatives. Within the EU, however, it is precisely the opacity of policy-making processes and the lack of public discourse that have been defined as core problems of democratic legitimacy. The FWF project therefore investigated if and to what extent national parliaments tap into their potential to connect their citizens to Europe by communicating EU affairs. Based on the assumption that citizens experience politics mainly through news coverage in the media, the aim was to investigate the communication efforts of national parliaments in EU as well as their visibility in the national media. As our results show, national parliaments have been responsive to the increased salience of the EU in public opinion and made an, in some cases considerable, effort to communicate EU politics. Especially the eurozone crisis and growing public Euroscepticism has led to a greater awareness of the importance of parliamentary communication, expressed for example, in an increase of plenary debates. Variation in the fulfilment of the communication function can mainly be explained with differences in parliamentary control rights, the level of intra-parliamentary conflict over the EU as well as public salience and Euroscepticism. At the same time, MPs often lament the lack of interest in parliamentary EU affairs by the media. And indeed, our data show that compared to executive or EU actors, parliaments are far less visible in the media in EU affairs. However, our results also show not only that news factors related to parliaments and EU politics such as influence, conflict relevance or negativity do play a role in explaining variation in the national coverage, but also that the visibility of parliaments in EU affairs also depends crucially on the actual news supply by parliaments themselves, especially in the form of plenary debates. In addition, we have even found a Europeanisation of parliamentary media reporting with a large percentage of articles focussing on parliamentary EU activities in other member states. Thus, despite variation across countries and types of newspapers, the media do not generally hamper but actually support parliaments in their effort to reach their citizens - but parliaments have to make that effort in the first place. Given that our period of observation covered the most turbulent time of the eurozone crisis, future research will have to show whether our observations outline a stable trend that will last beyond the crisis.