For the very first time in EU history, the 2014 EP elections provided citizens with the opportunity to influence the nomination of the Commission President by casting a vote for the main Europarties' 'lead candidates'. By subjecting the position of the Commission President to an open political contest, many experts have formulated the expectation that heightened political competition would strengthen the weak electoral connection between EU citizens and EU legislators, which some consider a root cause for the EU's lack of public support. In particular, this contest was on display in the so-called 'Eurovision Debate', a televised debate between the main contenders for the Commission President broadcasted live across Europe. Drawing on a quasi-experimental study conducted in 24 EU countries, we find that debate exposure led to increased cognitive and political involvement and EU support among young citizens. Unfortunately, the debate has only reached a very small audience.
This article contributes to the theoretical and methodological discussion on textual-contextual analysis in political communication and media research. It argues that taking into consideration both text and context throughout an analysis of the process of production enables the observation of the relation between the social and the linguistic. It opens up a non-deterministic perspective for the analysis of the above relation. The article rests upon an empirical study on the production of discourses for the campaign of European Parliament elections. The use of such a multilevel approach adds important elements to the research findings, particularly in terms of showing on the one hand how power relations within 'Europarties' results in the construction of common European identities in different European Union (EU) states, and on the other hand how professionalization of political communication reinforces discursive dissimilarities between parties of the same ideological family in different EU states.
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