What’s the talk in Brussels? Leveraging daily news coverage to measure issue attention in the European Union
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| Author | Michal Ovádek,Arthur Dyevre,Nicolas Lampach |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116520902530 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
European Union Politics
What’s the talk in
2020, Vol. 21(2) 204–232
! The Author(s) 2020
Brussels? Leveraging
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116520902530
daily news coverage to
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measure issue attention
in the European Union
Michal Ova´dek
Centre for Legal Theory and Empirical Jurisprudence, KU
Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
Nicolas Lampach
Centre for Legal Theory and Empirical Jurisprudence, KU
Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
Arthur Dyevre
Centre for Legal Theory and Empirical Jurisprudence, KU
Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
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 compre-
hensive 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
Corresponding author:
Michal Ova´dek, Centre for Legal Theory and Empirical Jurisprudence, KU Leuven, 45 Tiensestraat, 3000
Leuven, Belgium.
Email: michal.ovadek@kuleuven.be
Ova´dek et al.
205
illustrate how our measure relates to other indicators of EU agenda formation and
explain how researchers can make use of our new dataset.
Keywords
Dynamic topic model, issue attention, media, validation
Introduction
What issues receive political attention, or not, is a crucial aspect of politics.
Political attention is a scarce and precious good, for which aspiring agenda influ-
encers must compete along with institutionalized agenda-setters. So, since agenda
formation affects, either directly or indirectly, virtually all facets of politics,
it is not surprising that political scientists have expended considerable efforts on
mapping and explaining how policy agendas change (Baumgartner et al., 2006;
Baumgartner and Jones, 1993; Princen and Rhinard, 2006), issues and their frames
evolve (Carmines and Stimson, 1989; Diez-Medrano, 2004) and how democratic
institutions respond to public demands and concerns (Alexandrova et al., 2016;
Sorace, 2018).
European Union (EU) studies are no exception to the quest for reliable and
comprehensive indicators of issue attention. Much of the literature on agenda
formation in the context of EU affairs has concerned itself with the salience
of EU integration in domestic politics and media (Adam and Eschner, 2008;
Diez-Medrano, 2004; Koopmans and Pfetsch, 2006; Netjes and Binnema, 2007;
Peter and De Vreese, 2004; Rauh, 2014; Veen, 2011; Wonka, 2016). Owing to the
absence of ‘a genuinely supranational public sphere on the European level’
(Koopmans, 2007; Risse, 2010: 185), measuring the degree of ‘Europeanization’
of domestic politics has been the principal preoccupation of this strand of research.
At EU level, meanwhile, researchers have concentrated on the salience of individ-
ual issues and legislative files, often in connection with lobbying efforts (Beyers
et al., 2018; De Bruycker and Beyers, 2015; Du¨r and Mateo, 2014; Klu¨ver, 2011).
As with agenda research in other contexts, the development of a general measure
of issue attention has had to grapple with the difficulty of measuring salience in a
comprehensive manner (Wlezien, 2005), either due to prohibitive cost of measure-
ment techniques (surveys, expert interviews, human coding) or the lack of suffi-
ciently comprehensive data (Warntjen, 2012). Using European Council and
European Commission documents, though, researchers have evolved actor-based
indicators of agenda formation. Among these is the European Union Policy
Agendas Project (Alexandrova et al., 2014), which represents, to date, the most
comprehensive attempt to measure issue attention at EU level. The dataset covers
a wide range of policies across four decades and constitutes, without any doubt, a
major contribution to the study of agenda-setting in the EU context. Still, it
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European Union Politics 21(2)
exhibits important limitations. First, it is exclusively based on the items appearing
in European Council conclusions. Yet, what matters to the European Council may
not matter for other EU actors, and vice-versa. Researchers should therefore be
wary of using it as more than a measure of Council agenda priority. Second,
European Council conclusions emphasize high politics where national govern-
ments wish to set general guidelines and objectives for the bloc. Yet, for many
research questions, such as the influence of lobby groups on particular policies or
the comparative policy responsiveness of EU institutions on specific issues,
researchers need a measure that captures both high and low politics and is inde-
pendent of EU institutions. More broadly, what they need is a measure that
captures issue attention in the Brussels-bound, EU elite sphere that encompasses
Commissioners, Members of European Parliament (MEPs), EU civil servants,
diplomats, policy experts, EU contractors, consultants, pressure groups and
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as national government
representatives.
In this paper, we undertake to construct such a measure by leveraging text data
from the Agence Europe bulletin (AEB). AEB, we argue, is a ‘quasi-institutional’
news outlet which caters to EU policy wonks, civil servants and lobbyists. Published
daily, it covers all policy areas within the remit of EU competences along with
broader foreign policy and business news. The broad scope of AEB ensures that
it captures low as well as high politics. Analysing the entire universe of English-
language AEB from 1979 to 2018, we apply text-mining techniques, including
dynamic topic modelling, to construct a detailed classification of the bulletins’ con-
tents. The resulting dataset provides a measure of the proportion of 75 machine-
generated topics organized into 19 manually defined meta-categories.1 We validate
our indicator using a random sample of human-coded bulletins. Besides showing
how our measure of issue attention relates to other measures of EU agenda forma-
tion, we provide illustrations of how particular agenda items track international
developments and critical junctures in the European integration process.
Issue attention in the EU
Issue attention, agenda formation or issue saliency – we use these terms inter-
changeably2 – can be measured in a variety of ways. A useful distinction is between
generic and actor-centred measures (Beyers et al., 2018). Actor-centred indicators
approach issue saliency from the viewpoint of aspiring agenda influencers or insti-
tutionalized agenda setters. This is the approach adopted by researchers who have
constructed measures of issue prevalence from European Council, Council of
the European Union and European Commission files (Alexandrova, 2017;
Alexandrova et al., 2016, 2014; Carammia et al., 2016; H€age, 2016; Osnabru¨gge,
2015), European Parliament speeches (Greene and Cross, 2017) or, at the domestic
level, from debates in the legislature (Rauh, 2014; Wonka, 2016) or items in party
manifestos (Veen, 2011). This approach has the advantage of being both analyt-
ically and empirically tractable, in addition to having relevance for various strands
Ova´dek et al.
207
of research on EU politics. Each EU institution produces its own line of policy
documents and communications which scholars have been able to dissect and
interpret as issue attention (Alexandrova et al., 2014; Greene and Cross, 2017;
H€age, 2016; Osnabru¨gge, 2015). The variance in issue attention among different
institutions is itself an object of research (Alexandrova, 2017). The same holds for
electoral manifestos and legislative debates (Rauh, 2014; Veen, 2011; Wonka,
2016). In contrast to actor-centred measures, generic measures seek to capture
issue attention in the broader mediatized public sphere, assuming that this
sphere is imperfectly controlled and transcends the priorities of individual
agenda-setters. ‘Europeanization’ studies that aim to assess the attention paid to
the EU in domestic media (Adam and Eschner, 2008; Diez-Medrano, 2004;
Koopmans and Pfetsch, 2006; Peter and De Vreese, 2004) typically follow this
line of inquiry.
A comparison of the domestic and EU-level literatures on issue attention reveals
an interesting disparity. Whereas research on issue attention at the domestic level
features both generic and actor-centred approaches, the EU-level literature has
considered only the latter. The underlying reason for this asymmetry may seem
obvious. The EU lacks an autonomous public sphere (Koopmans, 2007; Risse,
2010: 185). Therefore, actor-based indicators may seem to adequately capture the
items that define the agenda in Brussels. The EU Policy Agendas Project is pred-
icated on the notion that the European Council is the most powerful agenda-setter
in the EU context (Alexandrova et al., 2014). Thus, what the EU pays attention to
should somehow find its way into European Council conclusions, or alternatively
into Commission documents or European Parliament speeches.
We believe, however, that actor-centred measures of agenda formation miss
...
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