Much ado about nothing? The (non-) politicisation of the European Union in social media debates on migration
| Author | Tobias Stöhr,Esther Ademmer,Anna Leupold |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1465116518802058 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
European Union Politics
Much ado about nothing?
2019, Vol. 20(2) 305–327
! The Author(s) 2018
The (non-) politicisation
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116518802058
of the European Union
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in social media debates
on migration
Esther Ademmer
Research Area ‘Poverty Reduction, Equity and
Development’, Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Kiel,
Germany; Department of Political Science, Kiel University,
Kiel, Germany
Anna Leupold
Department of Communication Science and Media
Research, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Tobias St€
ohr
Research Area ‘Poverty Reduction, Equity and
Development’, Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Kiel,
Germany; Institute of Labor Economics, Bonn, Germany
Abstract
The widespread view that the refugee crisis has sparked unprecedented levels of
European Union politicisation has rarely been backed by systematic empirical evidence.
We investigate this claim using a novel dataset of several thousand user comments
posted below articles of German regional media outlets on Facebook. Despite consid-
erable European Union authority in the policy area, extensive media coverage of the
crisis and the rise of a populist party in Germany, our results suggest that the politi-
cisation of Europe remains low among social media users, especially when compared to
national and subnational levels of governance. When talking about Europe, users hardly
Corresponding author:
Esther Ademmer, Research Area ‘Poverty Reduction, Equity and Development’, Kiel Institute for the World
Economy, Kiellinie 66, 24105 Kiel, Germany.
Email: esther.ademmer@ifw-kiel.de
306
European Union Politics 20(2)
refer to European Union institutions or policies. Instead, other member states and
notions of the geographic or cultural space dominate the debate.
Keywords
Migration, politicisation, public opinion, social media
Introduction
In the course of the financial and debt crises, scholars have argued that ‘politics is
back’ in the European Union (EU) (Risse, 2015) and that politicisation cannot be
reversed (De Wilde and Zu¨rn, 2012). There was hope for a more democratic
European integration process due to a greater public competition of ideas and
political programmes replacing or at least complementing the technocratic
European integration process of the past. Since the refugee crisis of 2015, the
public seems to vividly debate European asylum policies and the common
Schengen borders. On one side of the political spectrum, right-wing populist
parties that campaigned on anti-immigration and Eurosceptic positions gained
electoral attraction. On the other side, pro-European forces, such as Pulse of
Europe, mobilised. So, did the refugee crisis indeed politicise citizens in the EU?
Did it facilitate a larger public debate on the way European integration should
continue? And does it hence pave the way for a more democratic exchange
of ideas?
Such questions have been traditionally addressed under the label of politicisa-
tion research in EU studies. In this domain, three dimensions are used to charac-
terise the level to which EU-led regional integration is politicised: the salience of
the EU in public debates, the polarisation of opinions within these debates and
the number of people actually talking about Europe, named actor expansion
(De Wilde et al., 2016). Students of politicisation usually hypothesise that the
more authority the EU possesses in certain areas, the more likely it is to be
politicised. Politicisation in such areas is further facilitated by crisis situations
and the presence of right-wing parties. The refugee crisis and the recent rise of
right-wing parties thus represent a likely case for the EU to get politicised amongst
its citizens.
Another established tradition in politicisation studies is its focus on newspapers,
mostly the quality press (for some notable exception, cf. Baglioni and Hurrelmann,
2016, studying focus groups). Over the last years, however, social media has gained
importance for citizens consuming news and debating politics. Yet, social media
debates have received little attention from scholars dealing with politicisation. As
migration is the topic that inspires most comments by Facebook users (see e.g.
Larsson, 2018) and citizens who use social media as an important source of
Ademmer et al.
307
information followed user comments on the refugee crisis on Facebook closely
(Arlt and Wolling, 2017), knowledge about an important facet of the politicisation
of Europe is hence still missing.
In this article, we contribute to closing this gap and ask whether and to what
extent Europe has been politicised in social media debates. Based on a unique
dataset of over 600,000 Facebook user comments under over 30,000 articles
(‘posts’) and a manually coded subsample of around 5000 comments below articles
on the topic of migration and asylum published in regional newspapers in
Germany, we provide quantitative evidence about the politicisation of Europe
during the refugee crisis. Unlike previous analyses, this dataset allows us to analyse
politicisation over time as well as across local, national and European gover-
nance levels.
We provide evidence on the salience of debates about Europe during the refugee
crisis among users of regional newspapers’ Facebook sites. We show that Europe
has been increasingly debated, but that the salience of issues linked to Europe, the
EU or its member states has not increased relative to local or national levels. We
provide new insights on actor expansion, showing that a few users comment heavi-
ly on European themes, while the typical user comments on local themes and is
active less frequently – a pattern that has remained largely unchanged during the
refugee crisis. In addition, we show that in the rare cases in which social media
users refer to Europe, the EU is hardly mentioned. Rather, they debate the politics
of other member states or put forward a diffuse notion of Europe, which is used to
set Europe apart from other world regions, such as the Muslim countries in the
Middle East. Our findings hence suggest that among social media users, Europe
and especially the EU have not been increasingly politicised in the refugee crisis
when compared to other governance levels and over time.
This pattern emerges despite the fact that we pick a most likely case for polit-
icisation when analysing Facebook comments posted from 2010 to the end of
October 2016 in Germany: The EU’s authority in the field of asylum and migration
policy increased during this time and attracted a substantial amount of media
attention and public counter reactions. The crisis also provides a discursive oppor-
tunity for politicisation, in particular for the new German radical right party
Alternative fu¨r Deutschland (AfD) that should manifest itself especially on social
media. In addition, Germany was disproportionally affected by the crisis due to
the very large inflow of migrants and its central political role in European policy-
making and crisis management.
In sum – and for the part of the citizen arena under scrutiny here – we put a
question mark behind recent claims in the literature that the refugee crisis has led
to an increase in politicisation of the EU. While scholars find ample evidence in
favour of EU politicisation when analysing elite and institutional actors on the
basis of newspaper articles and parliamentary speeches, these findings do not seem
to travel easily to the arena of citizens actively commenting on the social media
outlets of German regional newspapers.
308
European Union Politics 20(2)
Citizens, institutions and the politicisation of the EU
Regional integration in Europe has for a long time shielded issues from being
politicised within member states (B€
orzel and Risse, 2018) without providing for
an EU-level substitute. This was made possible by the fact that the levels of policy-
making and democratic public spheres hardly coincide in the EU: debates about
policies remain confined to the national level, while a substantial amount of pol-
icies are made at the EU level. Since the most recent crises and the increasing
contestation of European integration in various national referendums after the
Maastricht Treaty, however, the EU has arguably become an issue in national
public spheres (Risse, 2015).
Politicisation is commonly defined as
a discursive phenomenon: it is not sufficient that actors are aware of an issue, or able
to form opinions about it; what is required is rather that an issue becomes salient in
political communication that seeks to influence – or responds to – collective decision
making (Hurrelmann et al., 2015:45).
Empirically, politicisation is usually conceived of as a three-dimensional concept
(De Wilde et al., 2016), whereby salience, i.e. the extent to which people talk about
Europe, constitutes a basic prerequisite for politicisation. Comprehensive forms of
politicisation are characterised additionally by polarisation and the expansion of
actors and audiences that talk about Europe.
The academic debate about whether, how and with which implications the EU
has been politicised in this regard is far from being settled, though. Some argue
that politicisation can help to foster European collective identities as people engage
in transnational political debates (Risse, 2010). Others argue instead that high
levels of politicisation increase political conflict and thus inhibit or at least further
differentiate integration outcomes (Schimmelfennig et al., 2015: 772).
The inconclusiveness of the...
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