Research Note: The Influence of the Press in Shaping Public Opinion towards the European Union in Britain
| Author | Jonathan Burton,Sean Carey |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2004.00499.x |
| Published date | 01 October 2004 |
| Date | 01 October 2004 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Research Note: The Influence of the
Press in Shaping Public Opinion
towards the European Union in Britain
Sean Carey
University of Sheffield
Jonathan Burton
University of Essex
Existing research finds that European citizens evaluate the EU according to the perceived costs
and benefits of integration. Instead of assuming that cue-givers provide an informational role in
this process, we investigate the direct effects of positive and negative EU messages from promi-
nent cue-givers, including political parties and the media. Using the 2001 British Election Study,
we examine the impact of the main political parties and newspapers on public attitudes towards
membership of the EU and the prospect of joining the single European currency. During the 2001
British General Election campaign, the media and the main political parties had small indepen-
dent effects on attitudes towards EU membership and the potential adoption of the single Euro-
pean currency. When voters receive the same messages from both their party and their newspaper,
these effects are considerable.
God is opposed to Britain joining EU’s single currency
(Headline in the Daily Telegraph, 14 May 2001)
For many decades, European integration was an elite-led process and public
opinion was assumed to be relatively unimportant to its progression. European
mass publics now play a much greater role in the integration process. Across the
member and candidate-member states, seventeen referendums have been held on
issues of European integration, and the reticence of public opinion in Britain,
Sweden and Denmark was significant in influencing the omission of these coun-
tries from the first round of monetary union. With the prospect of a major expan-
sion and the further integration of European states, an understanding of why
individuals support or oppose European integration is an increasingly important
area to study.
Research on attitudes towards the EU has focused on the perceived costs or ben-
efits that individuals receive from European integration. Matt Gabel argues that
the rational cost–benefit theory applies, because citizens respond to cues from
fellow citizens, elites and ‘easily accessible information from the media and inter-
est groups’ (1998a, p. 41). In this paper, we explicitly model the influence of two
of these cues – the mass media and political parties – on individual attitudes
towards the EU.
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2004 VOL 52, 623–640
© Political Studies Association, 2004.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
624 SEAN CAREY AND JONATHAN BURTON
We investigate the impact of the print media on attitudes to European integration
and European Monetary Union (EMU) during the general election campaign in
Britain in 2001. We find that newspapers do have an impact on attitudes to Europe,
but that these effects are relatively small. Identification with a political party is
found to exert greater influence on public opinion; and when individuals receive
reinforcing cueing information from both parties and the media, these effects are
stronger still.
Public Support for European Integration
Since the early 1990s, studies of public attitudes towards the EU has been domi-
nated by economic and rational cost–benefit explanations. Gabel (1998a, b) finds
that support for the EU rises as material gains within a country increase through
the liberalisation of the EU market. These individual-level socio-economic effects
are also supported by longitudinal aggregate-level evidence that support for Euro-
pean integration is influenced by national economic performance (Eichenberg and
Dalton, 1993).
Most cost–benefit-based explanations of support for the EU assume that individ-
uals are able to recognise the implications of European integration and how it
affects them. However, Chris Anderson (1998) demonstrates that, in virtually all
measures of knowledge and awareness of basic aspects of the integration process,
citizens are not particularly well informed. Without the necessary information that
cost–benefit models assume, he suggests that individuals use proxies in helping to
form attitudes towards the EU.
It has also been argued that identity acts as a cue in influencing support for the
EU. Within European countries, stronger feelings of national identity are identi-
fied as proxies for opposition to the EU (McLaren, 2002). This relationship is more
complex in the British case, where sub-national identities are particularly strong.
In the case of the UK, strong sub-national allegiances to Scotland, Wales and
Northern Ireland are related to higher levels of support for European integration,
but English identity tends to be related to opposition (Carey, 2002).
Political parties have been identified as having strong effects on attitudes towards
the EU, especially in research on EU referendums (see, for example, Hug and
Sciarini, 2000). Franklin et al. (1994) find that party preferences – in particular, the
support for the governing parties – was important enough to be the difference
between the ‘no’ and ‘yes’ outcomes in the two Danish referendums on approv-
ing the Maastricht Treaty. There is evidence to suggest that the British public take
their leads on European integration from their preferred party (Flickinger, 1994).
The Influence of the Mass Media on Political Attitudes
in Britain
With the growth of mass media in the 1930s and 1940s, many observers feared
that media influence would lead to a new form of elite domination of public
opinion. However, initial and subsequent research found that the effects of print
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