Thursday, June 27, 2013
A1.18D (Oudemanhuispoort)
Politicization has become a key concept in European integration studies during the last years. At the same time, the concept is not always clearly defined and it is still contested whether, when and to what extent European issues have actually become politicized in domestic political arenas. In this paper, we add to this discussion both in conceptual and empirical terms. On the one hand, we introduce a new politicization index that takes seriously the multi-dimensional character of the concept. On the other hand, we systematically trace the politicization of Europe in the national electoral arena of six West European countries from the early 1970s to the present. More specifically, we look at national election campaigns in Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. Based on a systematic relational content analysis of newspapers, we observe that European issues have indeed been politicized by political parties in national election campaigns. However, the extent and timing of politicization vary considerably across countries. Politicization is not uniformly a “post-Maastricht phenomenon” and we cannot observe a steady increase in all countries. We shed light on the cross-national variation by focusing on the main driving actors, the specific European issues discussed, and other contextual factors.
