The National Roots of European Publics: Comparing Online Engagement of National and Transnational Women's Advocacy Networks

Current debates on EU legitimacy include a focus on how to generate and sustain transnational publics. While there is consensus on the different properties of national versus transnational publics, there is limited knowledge about how national and transnational level outreach and engagement practices are connected. This paper presents evidence of the national roots of European-level women’s advocacy, arguing that the level of outreach of members of Brussels umbrella organizations is related to respective national cultures of outreach.

We investigate to what degree EU-level and nation-level women’s NGOs in the UK and Germany mobilize constituencies via online means. Utilizing network mapping tools as well as original data from about 100 women’s NGOs on the EU level, in the UK, and Germany, we analyze density and distribution of relationships in these networks as well as their actual usage of interactive communication means as indicators of their capacity to engage publics. We find that the tendencies we observe in the national networks are elevated and reinforced at the EU level. National UK women’s NGOs put much effort in creative and vivid online public engagement, whereas German national organizations are more inclined to static documentation of offline engagement or lobby work. At the EU level, the UK members of the women’s umbrella network (EWL) are even more active than national level UK NGOs and the German EWL members are slightly more passive than the German national women’s network.