Abstract
The Eurozone financial crisis was widely seen as a challenge to the legitimacy of the European Union (EU). It raised concerns about the quality of its policy outputs, the democratic character of its decision-making, and the EU’s willingness to respect its own legal framework. This article examines how the legitimacy dimension of the crisis was reflected in media discourse. Using methods of political claims analysis, it studies newspaper reporting in four Eurozone states (Germany, Austria, Spain, and Ireland) between 2009 and 2014. It inquires whether the Eurozone crisis led to an increase in discourse that explicitly challenged the legitimacy of the EU and assesses which discourse constellations were particularly likely to result in de-legitimation. The analysis shows that there was no dramatic erosion of legitimacy in media discourse. EU-related reporting was dominated by statements from EU and member-state executives and largely had a technocratic focus, until the outcome of the 2014 European Parliament election made popular discontent with the EU impossible to ignore.
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Notes
Legitimacy crises may also originate from other factors, most importantly institutional reform (Hurrelmann et al. 2009). The sequence model developed here focuses only on legitimacy crises that are triggered by public policy.
The study followed the Europub project in excluding statements that attribute opinions to political actors without explicit discursive evidence. Also excluded were statements that merely reported facts, were speculative, or made predictions for the future. In contrast to the Europub project, we did not treat political decisions (the legislature passing a law, etc.) or physical actions (arson against an asylum seekers’ residence, etc.) as claims unless they were accompanied by the explicit expression of a political opinion.
Articles were drawn from the databases FAZ BiblioNet (for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) and Factiva (for all other papers). Our automatic search used the terms ‘eu or europ* or eurozone’ on all articles published in the selected time periods.
The coding was performed by four extensively trained coders, including the authors of this article. The codebook, which includes a number of variables not used in this article, is available at https://carleton.ca/jmcdemocracy/wp-content/uploads/Hurrelmann-Baglioni-Gora-Wagner-Codebook-Eurozone-Crisis.pdf. We conducted inter-coder reliability tests for all stages of the analysis: for the selection of articles, our reliability test examined a sample of 100 automatically preselected articles; for the identification of claims within articles, we examined 20 relevant articles; and for the coding, we examined a sample of 20 claims. All reliability tests yielded satisfactory results. The values of Krippendorff’s α were 0.76 for article selection and 0.75 for claim identification. For the coding of claims, at the level of aggregation reported in this article, Krippendorff’s α was 0.96 for claimant; 0.71 for object; 0.74 for evaluation; 0.80 for demand; and 0.72 for justification. A replication dataset containing all coding categories used for this article is available at https://doi.org/10.5683/SP2/JHDT3R.
A diagnostic examination indicates an acceptable model. Multicollinearity diagnostics were satisfactory. The Omnibus Test of Model Coefficients (significance 0.000) and the Hosmer and Lemeshow test (significance 0.215) indicate acceptable model fit.
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Acknowledgements
Research for this project has been supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Project No. 435-2013-1813). Sebastian Baglioni and Anna Gora contributed to developing the conceptual framework for this study and conducted significant parts of the media analysis. Research assistance was also provided by Ana da Silva Soares, Sven Schirmer, and Nicole Warkotsch.
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Hurrelmann, A., Wagner, A. Did the Eurozone crisis undermine the European Union’s legitimacy? An analysis of newspaper reporting, 2009–2014. Comp Eur Polit 18, 707–728 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-020-00205-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-020-00205-6