The use of social media in EU policy communication and implications for the emergence of a European public sphere

Cohesion policy is the European Union’s (EU) main investment policy and seeks to strengthen economic, social and territorial cohesion. While accomplishments in this regard are constantly measured, European citizens are not always aware of the policy’s impact and the role the EU plays therein. This is especially relevant as the communication of EU policies is central to the emergence of a European public sphere, an acknowledged condition for European integration. In this paper, we aim at advancing research in this regard through the analysis of cohesion policy communication on the social media channels of ten Local Managing Authorities (LMAs) responsible for managing and communicating structural funds at the local level. By building on a bottom-up construction of shared meaning structures through semi-automatic analysis techniques, we make the following three observations: first, social media communication is indicative of "horizontal Europeanization"; second, Europeanization occurs both in the form of the spontaneous amalgamation of shared discontent expressed by citizens and the institutionalization of top-down EU communication measures adopted by LMAs; and third, a cluster of topics articulated internationally and showcasing a negative attitude towards the EU funding scheme suggests that, counter-intuitively, Euroscepticism seems to facilitate the emergence of a European public sphere

The use of social media in EU policy communication and implications for the emergence of a European public sphere

Cohesion policy is the European Union\u2019s (EU) main investment policy and seeks to strengthen economic, social and territorial cohesion. While accomplishments in this regard are constantly measured, European citizens are not always aware of the policy\u2019s impact and the role the EU plays therein. This is especially relevant as the communication of EU policies is central to the emergence of a European public sphere, an acknowledged condition for European integration. In this paper, we aim at advancing research in this regard through the analysis of cohesion policy communication on the social media channels of ten Local Managing Authorities (LMAs) responsible for managing and communicating structural funds at the local level. By building on a bottom-up construction of shared meaning structures through semi-automatic analysis techniques, we make the following three observations: first, social media communication is indicative of \u2018horizontal Europeanization\u2019; second, Europeanization occurs both in the form of the spontaneous amalgamation of shared discontent expressed by citizens and the institutionalization of top-down EU communication measures adopted by LMAs; and third, a cluster of topics articulated internationally and showcasing a negative attitude towards the EU funding scheme suggests that, counter-intuitively, Euroscepticism seems to facilitate the emergence of a European public sphere

D 3.1 'Qualitative report on the impact and effectiveness of communication strategies from the semi structured interviews with cohesion policy practitioners (including third-party partners in the consortium), written by each partner'

This document is a comparative synthesis of the reports on regional case studies written by PERCEIVE's partners. Each report is based both on an original data collection and on the analysis of the focus group's section that addresses communication issues. Each partner collected national and/or regional communication plans, which were mostly used for the first chapter of this report: "Communication strategy at different levels and LMAs' organization.

El uso de las redes sociales en la comunicación política de la UE y las implicaciones para el surgimiento de una esfera pública europea

Cohesion policy is the European Union’s (EU) main investment policy and seeks to strengthen economic, social and territorial cohesion. While accomplishments in this regard are constantly measured, European citizens are not always aware of the policy’s impact and the role the EU plays therein. This is especially relevant as the communication of EU policies is central to the emergence of a European public sphere, an acknowledged condition for European integration. In this paper, we aim at advancing research in this regard through the analysis of cohesion policy communication on the social media channels of ten Local Managing Authorities (LMAs) responsible for managing and communicating structural funds at the local level. By building on a bottom-up construction of shared meaning structures through semi-automatic analysis techniques, we make the following three observations: first, social media communication is indicative of ‘horizontal Europeanization’; second, Europeanization occurs both in the form of the spontaneous amalgamation of shared discontent expressed by citizens and the institutionalization of top-down EU communication measures adopted by LMAs; and third, a cluster of topics articulated internationally and showcasing a negative attitude towards the EU funding scheme suggests that, counter-intuitively, Euroscepticism seems to facilitate the emergence of a European public sphere.La política de cohesión es la principal política de inversión de la Unión Europea (UE) y busca fortalecer la cohesión económica, social y territorial entre las regiones europeas. Aunque los logros en este sentido se miden constantemente, los ciudadanos europeos no siempre son conscientes del impacto de la política y del papel que desempeña en ella la UE. Esto es especialmente relevante ya que la comunicación de las políticas de la UE es fundamental para el surgimiento de una esfera de comunicación pública europea, una condición reconocida para la integración europea. En este artículo, nuestro objetivo es avanzar en la investigación en este respecto a través del análisis de la comunicación de la política de cohesión en los canales de redes sociales de diez Autoridades Administrativas Locales (LMA en inglés) responsables de administrar y comunicar los proyectos financiados a través de estos fondos estructurales a nivel local. En este artículo utilizamos técnicas de análisis semiautomáticos del texto para reconstruir la estructura de significados que constituye las comunicaciones de las LMA en las redes sociales, y llegamos a los siguientes tres resultados: primero, la comunicación en las redes sociales es indicativa de "europeización horizontal"; segundo, la europeización ocurre tanto en la forma de la combinación espontánea del descontento compartido expresado por los ciudadanos, como en la institucionalización de las formas de comunicación originadas centralmente en la UE y adoptada localmente por las LMA; y tercero, encontramos varios temas articulados internacionalmente y que muestran una actitud negativa hacia el esquema de financiación de la UE. Este resultado sugiere que, al contrario de lo que podría parecer, el euroescepticismo parece facilitar el surgimiento de una esfera pública europea

PERCEIVE project - Deliverable D3.4 "Report on the statistical analysis of communication efforts’ impact and effectiveness on citizens’ awareness and appreciation of EU-financed projects"

Why is a focus on policy communication relevant to the practice and study of European integration? Over the two last two decades, no clear pattern seems to have emerged linking the efforts of the European Union (EU) to foster local development and reduction of disparities with a generalized increase in the levels of European identity. This constitutes a relevant challenge for both policy makers and local implementers as well as for students of the European integration process. In this context, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the potential role of cohesion policy – the EU’s largest investment policy aimed at promoting regional development and reducing disparities. Based on a recognition of previous research and direct experience acquired through interaction with practitioners of the cohesion policy field, in this report, we point out the importance of ‘awareness’ and ‘appreciation’ (of EU efforts) by EU citizens. This means that, albeit not a general rule, those who are aware of the policy often appreciate EU developmental policies and, when these two conditions are matched with each other, tend to fell more European. In managerial terms, this gap between institutions and citizens points to the centrality of policy communication. That is, we need to better understand the mechanisms and outcomes of communicating policy in todays’ practice of policy implementation. Accordingly, this report aims at increasing our understanding of a number of strategic aspects connected with the task of communicating EU regional cohesion policy at the local level. In more detail, two main aspects are dealt with: First, the extent to which local communication activities take part in a wider international discourse (i.e. through topics). Here, we expand our previous work (i.e. see PERCEIVE deliverables 5.3 and 3.3) on communicating EU cohesion policy through social media by analyzing contents generated by Local Managing Authorities’ (hereafter referred to as LMAs) use of Facebook. And second, the impact and effectiveness of communication efforts (i.e. the effect of the amount of communication investments and the content of communication activities on citizens’ awareness of EU policies and appreciation of EU actions). Inquiring this aspect entailed a statistical analysis of the association between communication efforts which LMAs disseminate the aims and accomplishments of regional cohesion policy on the one hand, and awareness as well as appreciation of the policy by EU citizens on the other hand. The outcomes of the social media analysis described as the first aspect above are also included as variables of the statistical analysis of the second focal aspect

PERCEIVE project - Deliverable D5.4 "Report of the comparative analysis of the correlation between topics emergent from regional discourses on the one hand, and the awareness and perceptions of the EU (from Eurobarometer) on the other hand"

The report at hand focuses on the statistical test of an eventual relationship between media representation of EU regional cohesion policy, among other explanatory variables, and individuals’ level of European identification as well as their different definitions of being European. At present time, it is largely acknowledged that individuals do not possess an innate sense of being European, rather, the meaning of such status is socially constructed. Accordingly, extant research has explored the role of the media in shaping the opinions of the general public. However, only recently has research started focusing on the potential role of cohesion policy in shaping EU identity and many aspects of this phenomenon are still unexplored. We claim that by extending knowledge in this still unfolding area our work contributes to the wider debate on European identity in several ways: a) by performing a media analysis in seven different countries we offer one of the first international evidences as most of the media analyses are conducted in individual national contexts; b) our study is based on a large ad-hoc designed survey which allows us to capture so far largely overlooked aspects of EU identity such as the multiplicity and synchronicity of levels – i.e. individual, regional and national – in a way that Eurobarometer-based research could not do so far; c) our survey also allowed us to explore in unprecedented depth the factors associated with different definitions of being European; d) we analyse media in a bottom-up way, that is, without using pre-coded frames of valence characterising most of extant research; e) along with standard interpretive techniques, we use formal methods for representing national media spaces such as topic modelling and sentiment analysis. We believe that this mixed method approach makes our study more replicable than purely qualitative ones, still, nuances and complexities of extracting meaning from text are better preserved than purely quantitative studies

The use of social media in EU policy communication and implications for the emergence of a European public sphere

Cohesion policy is the European Union’s (EU) main investment policy and seeks to strengthen economic, social and territorial cohesion. While accomplishments in this regard are constantly measured, European citizens are not always aware of the policy’s impact and the role the EU plays therein. This is especially relevant as the communication of EU policies is central to the emergence of a European public sphere, an acknowledged condition for European integration. In this paper, we aim at advancing research in this regard through the analysis of cohesion policy communication on the social media channels of ten Local Managing Authorities (LMAs) responsible for managing and communicating structural funds at the local level. By building on a bottom-up construction of shared meaning structures through semi-automatic analysis techniques, we make the following three observations: first, social media communication is indicative of ‘horizontal Europeanization’; second, Europeanization occurs both in the form of the spontaneous amalgamation of shared discontent expressed by citizens and the institutionalization of top-down EU communication measures adopted by LMAs; and third, a cluster of topics articulated internationally and showcasing a negative attitude towards the EU funding scheme suggests that, counter-intuitively, Euroscepticism seems to facilitate the emergence of a European public sphere.La política de cohesión es la principal política de inversión de la Unión Europea (UE) y busca fortalecer la cohesión económica, social y territorial entre las regiones europeas. Aunque los logros en este sentido se miden constantemente, los ciudadanos europeos no siempre son conscientes del impacto de la política y del papel que desempeña en ella la UE. Esto es especialmente relevante ya que la comunicación de las políticas de la UE es fundamental para el surgimiento de una esfera de comunicación pública europea, una condición reconocida para la integración europea. En este artículo, nuestro objetivo es avanzar en la investigación en este respecto a través del análisis de la comunicación de la política de cohesión en los canales de redes sociales de diez Autoridades Administrativas Locales (LMA en inglés) responsables de administrar y comunicar los proyectos financiados a través de estos fondos estructurales a nivel local. En este artículo utilizamos técnicas de análisis semiautomáticos del texto para reconstruir la estructura de significados que constituye las comunicaciones de las LMA en las redes sociales, y llegamos a los siguientes tres resultados: primero, la comunicación en las redes sociales es indicativa de "europeización horizontal"; segundo, la europeización ocurre tanto en la forma de la combinación espontánea del descontento compartido expresado por los ciudadanos, como en la institucionalización de las formas de comunicación originadas centralmente en la UE y adoptada localmente por las LMA; y tercero, encontramos varios temas articulados internacionalmente y que muestran una actitud negativa hacia el esquema de financiación de la UE. Este resultado sugiere que, al contrario de lo que podría parecer, el euroescepticismo parece facilitar el surgimiento de una esfera pública europea

The use of social media in EU policy communication and implications for the emergence of a European public sphere

Cohesion policy is the European Union’s (EU) main investment policy and seeks to strengthen economic, social and territorial cohesion. While accomplishments in this regard are constantly measured, European citizens are not always aware of the policy’s impact and the role the EU plays therein. This is especially relevant as the communication of EU policies is central to the emergence of a European public sphere, an acknowledged condition for European integration. In this paper, we aim at advancing research in this regard through the analysis of cohesion policy communication on the social media channels of ten Local Managing Authorities (LMAs) responsible for managing and communicating structural funds at the local level. By building on a bottom-up construction of shared meaning structures through semi-automatic analysis techniques, we make the following three observations: first, social media communication is indicative of ‘horizontal Europeanization’; second, Europeanization occurs both in the form of the spontaneous amalgamation of shared discontent expressed by citizens and the institutionalization of top-down EU communication measures adopted by LMAs; and third, a cluster of topics articulated internationally and showcasing a negative attitude towards the EU funding scheme suggests that, counter-intuitively, Euroscepticism seems to facilitate the emergence of a European public sphere

Влияние селективного света на рост каллусной культуры Artemisia annua L.

In this report we describe the results of the analysis that we performed through topic modeling on the texts that we collected and described in the previous deliverable 5.2. In particular, our aim was to analyze the latent meaning structure, and the shared meanings of EU policies and EU identity, on four levels of communication: 1) Communications of the EU: here we analyzed the magazine Panorama; 2) Local implementation: here we analyzed financed projects’ abstracts; 3) Local press: at this level we focus on newspapers; 4) Social media: at this level we focus on Facebook. The analysis performed with Topic Modeling on the corpus of tweets collected from Twitter did not provide good results, due to the short length of each tweet. It is a result that is expected, but collected data are not useless. In order to provide a better coherence of this report, which focuses on the results of Topic Modeling, we are therefore not providing an analysis of tweets here. On the contrary, we will analyze tweet in the next deliverable 3.3, that is aimed at analyzing the use LMAs make of social media. With regards to the other level, we are presenting 16 models: one model for Panorama, one model for financed projects’ abstracts, 7 models for newspapers – one for each country – and 7 models for Facebook. Regarding Facebook, LMAs in our case study region in UK do not have a Facebook profile. The seventh model regards thus European Institutions’ Facebook profiles. Each model is composed of a list of 20 topics, which we analyze and characterize through descriptive statististics. We focus in particular on the emergent topics related to European Identity and Cohesion Policy. Moreover, in this report, we make use of formal methods and techniques to visually represent the meaning of topics elicited through topic modeling. The following paragraph provides a short introduction to the technique of topic modeling. Then four paragraph accounts for the several topic models elicited at different level of communication. Finally, conclusions make sense of the whole analysis

Научно-производственное объединение как особый вид государственных объединений

This document is a comparative synthesis of the reports on regional case studies written by PERCEIVE’s partners. Each report is based both on an original data collection and on the analysis of the focus group’s section that addresses communication issues. Each partner collected national and/or regional communication plans, which were mostly used for the first chapter of this report: “Communication strategy at different levels and LMAs’ organization.