Tango on a Tightrope

The European Union (EU) has grown into one of the most contested issues in Europes political life against the background of almost 10 years of crisis. For even longer, it has appeared far removed from citizens political world as an opaque structure that is difficult to understand. It was, and still is, perceived as more of a paper tiger, imposing cumbersome regulations that constrain rather than facilitate everyday life. The growing scepticism towards the EU is mirrored in the success of populist parties and, for example, in the Brexit referendum, which will result in one of the political heavyweights leaving the EU. Political decision-makers are therefore, more than ever, challenged to tackle crises to convince citizens of the necessity and legitimacy of the EU. However, the success of decision-makers in crisis management is conditioned by the mass media, which are the communication channel to reach a mass audience. In this respect, media do not only transport contents connecting political elites and citizens but also filter and evaluate information and therefore influence public perceptions of politics. In that sense, politicians and journalists have been described to engage in a tango in which either one or the other may lead. However, apart from the observation that it depends on the circumstances, there is little agreement in the literature regarding who, in the end, comes out on top. The project therefore looks at how political-decision makers communicated about their crisis management to the public and how they were influenced by media contents in their attempts to tackle crises. The project looks into press releases of government and administration institutions at the national level and EU level in Austria, Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom over the last 10 years. It connects these press releases with coverage of the main newspapers. In doing so, it will employ computerized analysis tools and, for the first time, conduct a systematic long-term analysis of EU crisis management communication connecting it to its portrayals in the media. We will use approaches from media and public relation studies, developing an innovative framework for analysis. The results of the project will advance the academic discussion in the field but also, more practically, inform political actors about the quality of their media performance and their crisis management. EU crises have also decreased citizens trust in politics and an analysis of crisis management will help us understand how politicians may have contributed to this outcome and what they should learn for the future.

The Tango project developed a new framework for analysing political crisis communication. Crises have been so prevalent in our societies over the last years that it seems almost normal to be in crisis. This is true for the European Union in particular, but also for its member states. Consequences of, for example, the financial crisis, the Euro crisis, the migration crisis, Brexit, or the pandemic, are often discussed under the headlines of populism, the rise of authoritarianism, and the diagnosis that democracy as such is in crisis, too. What role have political decision-makers played in these developments and has their way of managing these crises maybe furthered them? Given that political communication is diffused via the news media, how did their coverage influence crisis dynamics? Our framework provides a new angle on these questions. We collected and analysed the press releases of four governments (Austria, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom) and the EU's executive institutions (European Commission, Council of the EU, European Council), using automated methods of data collection and text analysis. We found that politicians use anxious language when they talk about crises. While this seems on the one hand intuitive, it is important that politicians remain calm and give the public an impression of having control of the situation. They might, thus, have contributed to a climate of fear, maintaining the crisis and fuelling the crisis of democracy. Another finding is that the European Union, unlike the national governments, does not seem to address the public in its crisis communication but communicates to policy-makers in its public communication. This is another indicator of the remoteness of the EU and the diagnosis that the EU and its policies lack legitimacy. The Tango project also made a methodological contribution by comparing different approaches to measuring frames in an automated way, i.e., measured by the computer. We compared so called unsupervised and supervised machine-learning approaches where unsupervised means no prior input, i.e., the computer explores data 'by itself'; supervised, then, stands for giving the computer example material to learn which it should code in another corpus. The results confirm what is stated in the literature, namely that fully supervised approaches are better in coding frames. We contribute to existing research by discussing different aspects of approaches in a detailed way to empower other researchers to make an informed decision for their own projects.