How political parties frame the European integration process

Abstract

This article proposes to study how national political parties frame the European integration process, in order to better understand how Europe actually figures into national political discourses. We argue that framing strategies depend strongly on parties’ positions and standing. To verify our hypotheses, we will account for the fact that political parties’ arguments might be influenced by country-specific characteristics and the specific issues being debated. Drawing on Habermas’ typology of pragmatic-, identity- and value-related arguments, we provide sophisticated frame categorizations to capture the complex structure of argumentation, going beyond a simple dichotomization of economic and cultural frames. Relying on a large and original media dataset for the period from 2004 to 2006 in six Western European countries, we will be in the position to test a series of hypotheses that have so far only been tested in individual countries