What’s the talk in Brussels? Leveraging daily news coverage to measure issue attention in the European Union

Abstract

Research on issue attention in the European Union has focused on the prominence of EU integration in domestic politics and media and, at EU level, on the salience of individual issues and legislative files, often in relation to lobbying. Existing EU-level measures of issue saliency, though, are limited in scope and periodicity and tend to reflect the policy priorities of a single institutional actor rather than that of the broader EU elite sphere. We present an alternative measure of issue attention leveraging the quasi-institutional nature of the Agence Europe daily bulletin which provides comprehensive but independent news coverage of EU affairs. We use text-mining techniques, including dynamic topic modelling, in combination with manual classification to map issue prevalence between 1979 and 2018. In addition to reporting validation results, we illustrate how our measure relates to other indicators of EU agenda formation and explain how researchers can make use of our new dataset.

Patterns of coordination in the European Commission: an analysis of interservice consultations around climate change adaptation policy (2007–2018)

“…Based on our current data it is difficult to distinguish between the influence of increasing stakes following from the status of the proposal or from broader political and societal salience, which also increased over the period of analysis (see e.g., Ovádek et al, 2020 on EU issue attention). Still, the relatively lower level of conflict in the (relatively less consequential) 2018 ISC suggests that the stakes in a proposal do play a role in their own right.…”

Regulating the European Data‐Driven Economy: A Case Study on the General Data Protection Regulation

“…EURACTIV articles were sampled from July 2015 onwards after Europolitics was discontinued. We chose European newspapers for two reasons: first, because they provide a good reflection of the content and coalitional composition of the EU policymaking discourse, which is what we are interested in (Ovádek, Lampach, and Dyevre 2020); second, any choice of spcific national newspapers would have been arbitrary to a certain extent, and would have biased our results towards the peculiarities of specific national discourses.…”