Project Fear: how the negativity of the referendum campaign undermines democracy

The referendum debate is not living up to its democratic ideals. Both sides of the divide have focused heavily on negative, fear-based arguments to make their case, which prevent democratic engagement among the electorate. Charlotte Galpin shows how this negativity is inhibiting critical reflection and fostering cynicism. She also notes that the debate is non-inclusive, with an striking absence of minorities and female experts in the campaign

Boris Johnson is damaging Germany’s goodwill towards the UK

Boris Johnson is damaging Germany’s goodwill towards the UK, argues Charlotte Galpin. She writes that despite Germany’s long-standing respect for its British partners, the Federal Republic trades more with the EU27 than it does with the UK and it has a profound ideological commitment to European integration that is seldom appreciated in Britain

At the Digital Margins? A Theoretical Examination of Social Media Engagement Using Intersectional Feminism

This article applies an intersectional feminist lens to social media engagement with European politics. Disproportionately targeted at already marginalised people, the problem of online abuse/harassment has come to increasing public awareness. At the same time, movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo have demonstrated the value of social media in facilitating global grassroots activism that challenges dominant structures of power. While the literature on social media engagement with European politics has offered important insights into the extent to which social media facilitates democratic participation, it has not to date sufficiently accounted for patterns of intersectional activism and online inequalities. Using Nancy Fraser’s feminist critique of Habermas’ public sphere theory and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, this article explores patterns of gender and racial inequalities in the digital public space. By analysing both the role of racist and misogynistic online abuse targeted at women, nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant people in public life, as well as the opportunities for marginalised groups to mobilise transnationally through subaltern counter-publics, I argue that social media engagement is inextricably linked with offline inequalities. To fully understand the impact of social media on European democracy, we need to pay attention to gendered and racialised dynamics of power within the digital public sphere that have unequal consequences for democratic participation. This will involve expanding our methodological repertoire and employing tools underpinned by a critical feminist epistemology

Converging towards Euroscepticism? Negativity in news coverage during the 2014 European Parliament elections in Germany and the UK

In the run up to the 2014 European Parliament elections, the new Spitzenkandidaten process and European-wide party campaigns were considered a mechanism to create a more engaged European public. However, right-wing Eurosceptic party groupings gained a significant minority of the seats in the 2014 EP elections. We place this in the context of media and public sphere dynamics of politicised EP elections that have given selective salience to Euroscepticism. We discuss two interrelated media biases that explain this convergence of public debates towards Euroscepticism: a media negativity bias in the selection and tonality of EU news and a media polity bias that privileges contestation of the constitutional make-up of the EU over political and policy-based debates. To investigate these media biases empirically, we analyse EP election news during the 2014 European Parliament elections, taking Germany and the UK as ideal-type cases. We find that the UK news demonstrates a strong negative bias towards the EU polity, whereas in Germany EP debates focus more strongly on EU politics and policies and in fact demonstrate a positivity bias with regard to assessments of the legitimacy of the EU polity

‘Brexit’ in transnational perspective: an analysis of newspapers in France, Germany and the Netherlands

The Brexit vote of 23 June 2016 is expected to have a profound impact, not only on Britain itself, but also on the remaining 27 member states of the European Union. This article looks at how the Brexit debate was perceived outside of Britain. Was there a sense of understanding for British concerns or was there rather a focus on maintaining unity in the face of British exceptionalism? Combining insights from European public sphere research and Euroscepticism research, we conduct a qualitative framing analysis of the discourse in leading centre-right newspapers in France, Germany and the Netherlands, as common ground with British Eurosceptics is most likely to be found here. Our analysis shows that initially there was some support for British calls for amending its relationship with the Union, in particular in Germany and the Netherlands. However, as the referendum drew nearer, the discourse shifted towards the need to maintain unity amongst the remaining member states

Euro crisis...identity crisis? The single currency and European identities in Germany, Ireland and Poland

This thesis examines the effect of the Euro crisis on the construction of European identities in three case study countries- Germany, Ireland and Poland. Combining a social constructivist approach to European identities with the constructivist and discursive institutionalist literature on ideational change and crisis, it investigates the extent to which the crisis constituted a 'critical juncture' for European identity discourses. Through extensive qualitative frame analysis of political and media discourse at key moments of the crisis, it examines how European identities are constructed through the debates about the crisis. The central argument is that the Euro crisis has had little effect on European identities because actors construct the crisis in their respective national contexts. In doing this, they draw on existing identities and ideas which then 'endogenises' the crisis into the existing national discourses. Where identity change is possible, it is subtle rather than a dramatic shift. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the EU has remained completely unified. Because the crisis generally serves to reinforce, rather than challenge, existing identities, attachments to national sovereignty and old national stereotypes have created or reinforced divisions particularly between northern and southern Europe and core and periphery