Only Hot Air? National Parliamentary Discourse and Its Effect on Public Opinion on the European Union
Speaker: (opens in a new window)Rebecca Kittel (Free University Berlin)
Wednesday, November 13, 14:00–14:45 (Irish time)
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Abstract: The European Union (EU) is nowadays a hot issue in national politics. As a result of years of intense crises, such as the Eurocrisis, the refugee crisis or, more recently, the war in Ukraine, the EU and the process of European decision-making have become objects of contestation in national parliaments. Existing studies have unveiled that mainstream political parties adopt pro-EU views, whereas extremist political parties defend anti-EU stances. How national parliamentary discourse on the EU affects public opinion, however, remains unknown. Often, individuals have very little knowledge about the EU. Evidence demonstrates that EU politics are perceived as more complex and technical than national politics. Parliaments, the biggest arenas for deliberation and communication, can contribute to the dissemination of information and arguments that foster individuals to formulate their political preferences. Thus, the national parliamentary discourse can, arguably, influence public opinion on the EU. We hypothesise that when radical parties talk significantly more and in a negative tone about the EU, public opinion towards the EU becomes more negative. However, we expect radical right voters to exert a bigger influence over the EU attitudes of diverse types of voters. By looking at parliamentary speech data and individual-level data from eight EU countries between 2000 and 2021, we analyse how public opinion on the EU is shaped by the national parliamentary discourse. Detecting EU-related issues in parliamentary debates through topic models, we analyse the sentiment applied by parties when they talk about the EU.
About the speaker: (opens in a new window)Rebecca Kittel is a Post Doctoral Researcher at Free University Berlin, Germany and a Guest Researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), Germany. She is currently working in the ERC-funded project LOOPS - The Logistics of Popular Uprisings in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes. Before, she was a PhD Researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Her research focuses on elite communication strategies and their effect on voters. To trace party positions and politicians’ language style, she applied a series of computational text analysis tools including machine learning and dictionaries. To test the causal effect of language patterns on voter behaviour, she conducted a survey experiment in the German context. She was also a visiting researcher at the NYU Wilf Family Department. Her research interests lie in the fields of comparative politics and political communication with a focus on computational social science methods.