Political communication has become one of the central arenas of innovation in the application of automated analysis approaches to ever-growing quantities of digitized texts. However, although researchers routinely and conveniently resort to certain forms of human coding to validate the results derived from automated procedures, in practice the actual "quality assurance" of such a "gold standard" often goes unchecked. Contemporary practices of validation via manual annotations are far from being acknowledged as best practices in the literature, and the reporting and interpretation of validation procedures differ greatly. We systematically assess the connection between the quality of human judgment in manual annotations and the relative performance evaluations of automated procedures against true standards by relying on large-scale Monte Carlo simulations. The results from the simulations confirm that there is a substantially greater risk of a researcher reaching an incorrect conclusion regarding the performance of automated procedures when the quality of manual annotations used for validation is not properly ensured. Our contribution should therefore be regarded as a call for the systematic application of high-quality manual validation materials in any political communication study, drawing on automated text analysis procedures.

The role of national parliaments in EU matters has become an important subject in the debate over the democratic legitimacy of the European Union. Yet despite a remarkable increase in parliamentary involvement in EU affairs, the added value in terms of democratic legitimacy will remain limited if citizens are not aware of their activities. Given that citizens mainly experience politics through the media, the aim of the paper is therefore to explore whether and under what conditions parliamentary involvement in EU matters is visible in national newspapers. The paper draws on two quantitative datasets covering parliamentary EU activities and relevant newspaper articles in seven Member States between 2010 and 2013. Results suggest that the efforts of active parliaments pay off. In addition, conflict within government coalitions over EU issues and greater salience of EU politics in public opinion increase coverage while, surprisingly, both public and parliamentary euroscepticism do not.

National parliaments have the potential to serve as transmission belts between the European Union (EU) and their citizens. By publicly communicating EU issues, they can enhance the visibility, public accountability and ultimately the legitimacy of supranational governance. Not least since the Eurozone crisis, this task has become increasingly important in the ever more politicised context of EU integration characterised by public and partisan contestation. Against this background, the aim of the paper is to investigate the communication efforts of national parliaments in EU affairs and, in particular, to analyse the impact of the levels of contestation of EU issues both within the public and the parliamentary arena on their communication activities. In a nutshell, in how far has political contestation acted as a catalyst for parliamentary communication of EU affairs? Our data on plenary activities in seven EU parliaments from 2010 to 2013 reveals that political contestation in public opinion has a positive impact, while contestation within parliament may hamper communication of EU affairs.

With the explosive growth in research topics, communication science is said to be more fragmented and hyper-specialized than ever before, producing an increasing number of small, niche research topics that lack intellectual coherence as a whole. While such issues have been a central concern for the field, there has been a relative lack of systematic effort to map the topical interconnections among different communication science subfields, answering the question of how they remain empirically fragmented. Using full-texts of scholarly articles published in the top 20 communication science journals from 2010 to 2019, we provide systematic evidence to such claims in terms of their actual contents and their connectivity patterns. Drawing on extant works concerning the sociology of science and structures of scientific knowledge, as well as on topic modeling and simulation-based inferences on network topological features, we find that subdisciplinary linkage in communication is more frequent than we often think.

In communication research, topic modeling is primarily used for discovering systematic patterns in monolingual text corpora. To advance the usage, we provide an overview of recently presented strategies to extract topics from multilingual text collections for the purpose of comparative research. Moreover, we discuss, demonstrate, and facilitate the usability of the "Polylingual Topic Model" (PLTM) for such analyses. The appeal of this model is that it derives lists of related clustered words in different languages with little reliance on translation or multilingual dictionaries and without the need for manual post-hoc matching of topics. PLTM bridges the gap between languages by making use of document connections in training documents. As these training documents are the crucial resource for the model, we compare model evaluation metrics for different strategies to build training documents. By discussing the advantages and limitations of the different strategies in respect to different scenarios, our study contributes to the methodological discussion on automated content analysis of multilingual text corpora.

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The paper explores newspapers’ portrayals of the European Parliament and national parliaments (NPs) in European Union (EU) affairs. To understand underlying perceptions of journalists, it takes public parliamentary activities and looks at their influence on parliaments’ news visibility in Finland, Germany and the UK in routine periods in 2011 and 2012. This is done against the background that parliaments, regarded as ultimate legitimisers of state power, depend on the mass media to reach their citizenry. However, journalists follow their own agenda in publishing parliamentary news. In this regard, they may highlight the complementarity, competition or cooperation of parliaments in the EU’s unique multi-tier environment. Overall, our results suggest that NPs correspond stronger with newsmakers’ anticipation of readership interest. In addition, findings seem to support the assumption that parliaments in the EU are mostly perceived as complementary, separate legislative branches in EU decision-making.

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