The (de)Politicizing Behaviour of National Political Parties on European Integration
(2018) ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops 2018 — Location: Nicosia (10.April.2018)
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- Abstract
- The main goal of this paper is to present briefly the current state of a research aiming at analysing the politicization of European integration in political parties’ discourses. The three main elements of our approach are the following : (1) focusing on the genuine politicizing behaviour of political actors, (2) using parties press releases as data in order to have a much more fine-grained analysis, (3) analysing such data through quantitative text analysis. In the first part, we will present the main trends in the literature on politicization of European integration. Specifically, we will focus on the previous empirical studies and on the different techniques researchers have used to analyse politicization. Regarding these two aspects, one can observe that a widely shared conceptualisation of politicization has led to a widely shared operationalisation. However, we argue that the genuine behaviour of specific political actors have been overlooked. Moreover, while politicization has been studied as a disembodied process, the observation of recent actual events tells a very different story. A story where actors, their attitudes and their strategies, matter. This is why we think it is important to study such genuine politicizing behaviours. More particularly, we are interested in studying the politicizing communication of national political parties. In the second part, we will present our original approach to measure the politicizing communication of political actors such as political parties. We argue that the politicizing effect of these discourses consist in the interaction between the level of salience and polarization. In order to analyse these two dimensions we need to select data produced by the actor and meant to be public. Finally, a quantitative text analysis method seems the most promising to deal with such data. In the last section, we will present the results of our investigation on the politicizing discourses of political parties in Ireland and in the United Kingdom. These cases have been chosen because they are the perfect cases to test our method. Indeed, they share the same language, which makes much more easier a comparison of the analysis of discourses, and they are very different cases regarding the European integration issue.
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Versailles, A. (2018). The (de)Politicizing Behaviour of National Political Parties on European Integration. ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops 2018, Nicosia. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/56401