A SWIFT change after Lisbon? The European Parliament's salience in the media

The case of SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) has generated a heated discussion between the European Parliament, the Council, and the Commission concerning the data exchange via bank transfers between the EU and the US. However, although the case had attracted opponents and critics from within the European Parliament in discussions about both security policy and citizen rights since the disclosure of the SWIFT service in 2006, the issue became most salient in the European quality press at the time when the European legislature rejected an interim agreement in February 2010. The paper investigates the variation of media coverage over time by drawing on a comprehensive content analysis of quality newspapers in six EU countries as well as on interviews with the respective correspondents in Brussels. It argues that the enactment of the Lisbon Treaty is responsible for the Parliament’s greater visibility in the press – it gave the institution the power to veto the agreement. Yet, the study not only discovers variation over time but also across countries which is being related to the role of the national parliaments in the SWIFT debate suggesting some form of rivalry in the mediated public sphere exemplified by the German case. Despite being a single yet crucial case study, it has positive implications for the democratic deficit debate. Since the media hold the important function of transmitting news and information to Europe’s citizens their reportage could potentially lead to more public awareness of the EU and its representative body in the post-Lisbon era

European broadsheets pay regular attention to the European Parliament between EU elections

The European Parliament is often accused of being distant from EU citizens, both geographically, and in its decision making. Many have also accused it of lacking newsworthiness, but is this actually the case? Katjana Gattermann has closely examined broadsheet news coverage of the European Parliament. She finds that, while not independent from the domestic arena, there is a steady and predictable supply of news on the European Parliament, implying that it is a newsworthy and essential part of EU broadsheet coverage

News about the European Parliament: patterns and drivers of broadsheet coverage

This thesis is about broadsheet coverage of the European Parliament (EP). More precisely, it studies the amount and content of news referring to the EP as well as the professional attitudes of their producers. The main purpose of the thesis is to explain variation in the press coverage. Thereby it combines political communication research with the European integration literature discussing the legitimacy of the EP. It argues that cross-country and inter-temporal variation cannot be explained by factors internal to news production alone. Instead, national parliamentary traditions impact profoundly on the way EU parliamentary affairs are reported. The thesis employs a mixed-methods research design. It conducts a quantitative content analysis of 18 broadsheets published in six European countries – Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria – over three time periods: one is a routine period of two years; the remaining two datasets are oriented at key issues and events over time. In total, 3956 newspaper articles are analysed. In addition, 18 in-depth interviews with the respective Brussels correspondents and a director at the EP Directorate-General for Communication complement the findings. While the EP receives regular coverage, the thesis finds that news are selected and presented according to the interest of the audience. Hence the domestic angle prevails in the news coverage and the EP’s own prominence and potential to generate conflict attract media attention more often when major issues are at stake. However, domestic relevance is not the only explanatory factor. While newsmakers also respond to varying levels of public support for EU membership, the thesis identifies national parliamentary traditions as a strong external driver of EP news coverage. Here, procedural characteristics and public expectations shape the amount and content of EP news as well as newsmakers’ attitudes – and more significantly so with the rising powers of the Parliament

Integrating Passengers\u27 Routes in Periodic Timetabling: A SAT approach

The periodic event scheduling problem (PESP) is a well studied problem known as intrinsically hard. Its main application is for designing periodic timetables in public transportation. To this end, the passengers\u27 paths are required as input data. This is a drawback since the final paths which are used by the passengers depend on the timetable to be designed. Including the passengers\u27 routing in the PESP hence improves the quality of the resulting timetables. However, this makes PESP even harder. Formulating the PESP as satisfiability problem and using SAT solvers for its solution has been shown to be a highly promising approach. The goal of this paper is to exploit if SAT solvers can also be used for the problem of integrated timetabling and passenger routing. In our model of the integrated problem we distribute origin-destination (OD) pairs temporally through the network by using time-slices in order to make the resulting model more realistic. We present a formulation of this integrated problem as integer program which we are able to transform to a satisfiability problem. We tested the latter formulation within numerical experiments, which are performed on Germany\u27s long-distance passenger railway network. The computation\u27s analysis in which we compare the integrated approach with the traditional one with fixed passengers\u27 weights, show promising results for future scientific investigations

Newspapers focus on who MEPs are rather than on what they do in the European Parliament

For the European Parliament to confer legitimacy on the EU’s legislative process it is necessary for voters to be aware of the actions taken by MEPs. But how do newspapers cover the work of the Parliament? Based on a study of newspaper coverage of 302 MEPs, Katjana Gattermann and Sofia Vasilopoulou write that the visibility of individual politicians in the media is not greatly linked to their legislative activity, but instead to their wider profile in domestic politics. As such there is a potential motivation problem concerning MEPs with career ambitions in national politics, as they may benefit from spending less time in the Parliament

What difference do Spitzenkandidaten make for European voters?

The Spitzenkandidaten process, which was first used in the 2014 European Parliament elections, is intended to boost voter awareness and participation. But does it live up to these aims? Drawing on a new study, Katjana Gattermann and Franziska Marquart find evidence that while the Spitzenkandidaten procedure itself might not influence electoral participation, individual candidates can still matter for voters’ choices

Party contestation and news visibility abroad: The 2019 European Parliament election from a pan-European perspective

We ask whether and why European political parties receive election news coverage abroad and investigate this phenomenon by combining theoretical stipulations regarding the politicisation of European integration and the horizontal Europeanisation of national public spheres. Based on a content analysis of 64 newspapers in 16 European Union countries following the 2019 European Parliament election, we argue that contestation over European integration increases the likelihood that foreign journalists report election results from a particular member state. Eurosceptic parties are more often visible abroad than Europhile parties, unless they stood for election in a highly polarised party system. Our results have important implications for the European Union's legitimacy as contestation over European integration increases the chances for citizens to learn about election results in other European countries