“We” in the EU: (De) legitimizing power relations and status

The article analyzes how the leaders and the candidates of the main parties in Romania built a European field of power and subject positions in the context of the 2019 European elections. We adopt the premise that the (re) positioning of these politicians towards the EU is part of their ongoing strategies of (de) legitimization. In this respect, the study focuses on how they assign themselves a “European authority” in relation to audiences through their positioning as actors in the field. On the basis of a mainly critically discursive methodological framework, we analyze a corpus consisting of electoral messages on Facebook. The research reveals the ways in which the political actors build claims, representations and positionings about the EU through naturalizing (a) symmetric relations, statuses, and symbolic power hierarchies.

The use of emotions in 2019 European Elections campaign materials

This research analyses three fundamental questions to determine how, when and by whom emotions are used in campaign materials (political propaganda). Focusing on the 2019 European elections we carry out a three-phase analysis. Firstly, we check the use of rational content against content that appeals to voters’ emotions. Secondly, we observe which of these emo tions are channelled towards the use of negative strategies and, therefore, identifying who is the object of this attack. And lastly, we determine which party families make the most use of humorous content since this resource is believed to be part of an appeal to voter’s feelings and, therefore, it is essential to know if there are differences between political groups. Considering this analytical strategy, the structure of the work begins with the contextualisation of the 2019 European elections to focus, later, on highlighting the importance of electoral campaigns as a given time when communicative activity intensifies. Once the importance of electoral campaigns has been defined the article analyses how campaign materials, in a general context of political propaganda, are one of the most powerful tools. In this sense, the analytical strategy of political parties’ campaign materials can be said to focus on the use of emotions. Data from the European Elections Monitoring Center (EEMC) has been used not only for theoretical contextualization, but throughout the whole paper.

The Commercial Fourth Estate in the 2014–2019 Election Campaigns

The paper presents results of media monitoring during the election campaigns held in Bulgaria between 2014 and 2019 – after the adoption of the new Electoral Code in 2014 until the last local elections in 2019. The main research question is to what extent the media as mediators in the election campaigns know, respect and comply with the legal regulations concerning their activities during such campaigns. The results outline the models of legal socialization of the Fourth Estate in the election campaigns. They also show patterns of compliance and violation of the legal framework. In addition, they reflect the way in which the media work to change the regulations in question. The research sample included between 117 and 180 media service providers in various election campaigns. There were representatives of all media subfields – traditional media, new media, yellow media, brown media, Prokopiev’s media, Peevski’s media, as well as Russian and American “propaganda media”. The period of research includes almost two full election cycles ‒ two parliamentary elections, two European elections, two local elections, and one presidential election which was held after the clear definition of the legal framework for media in the 2014 Electoral Code. No changes were made to this framework during the study and prior to the publication of this paper. This leads to conclusions regarding the electoral legislation and the regulation of the media system in the electoral process.

Religion and the European Parliament

This chapter discusses the salience, relevance, and effects of religion at the European Parliament (EP) across a range of issues. These are: the allocation of power (religion and European elections); the profile of political elites (members of the EP and religion); the structuring of political forces (religion and party politics, using the example of Christian democracy); and religion and public policy (with cases studies of identity politics and counter-radicalization). The chapter concludes that, when dealing with religion, the EP mirrors what happens in European societies more generally in terms of the secularization and culturalization of faith. The EP also duplicates a frequently found feature of EU policy making: that is, to hollow out the normative and controversial content from religion and to address the topic through the repertoire of human rights, while respecting the national diversity of Member States.

A DEA MCDM Approach Applied to ESS8 Dataset for Measuring Immigration and Refugees Citizens’ Openness

The current refugees’ crisis is undermining the main government coalitions of many countries in the European Union (EU), and tolerant attitudes and open admission policies toward immigrants seem to be part of the recent past history. The dilemma is gaining a lot of media attention as the public and political debate on migration is now playing an important role in all the European elections. Thus, the aim of this paper twofold. First, an analytical tool is developed to measure two synthetic indicators: (1) the citizens’ openness towards immigration for 23 countries—18 EU Countries, plus Iceland, Israel, Norway, Switzerland, and Russia—included in the 2016 European Social Survey; and (2) the citizens’ openness towards immigrants and refugees for 22 countries (same set without Hungary). And second, the effects of political orientation of citizens over the last synthetic indicator (immigrants and refugees) are studied. The approach of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) will be adopted here, with the purpose of identifying which countries are more, or less, open to the phenomenon of immigration and refugees. The results show that the Nordic countries and leftist are those which show more openness to immigration and refugees.

Microtargeted propaganda by foreign actors: An interdisciplinary exploration

This article discusses a problem that has received scant attention in literature: microtargeted propaganda by foreign actors. Microtargeting involves collecting information about people, and using that information to show them targeted political advertisements. Such microtargeting enables advertisers to target ads to specific groups of people, for instance people who visit certain websites, forums, or Facebook groups. This article focuses on one type of microtargeting: microtargeting by foreign actors. For example, Russia has targeted certain groups in the US with ads, aiming to sow discord. Foreign actors could also try to influence European elections, for instance by advertising in favour of a certain political party. Foreign propaganda possibilities existed before microtargeting. This article explores two questions. In what ways, if any, is microtargeted propaganda by foreign actors different from other foreign propaganda? What could lawmakers in Europe do to mitigate the risks of microtargeted propaganda?

Political Preferences of the Ukrainian National Minority in Poland in the Elections to the European Parliament

The paper describes, interprets, and characterizes the results of elections to the European Parliament in Poland based on the voting behaviour of the Ukrainian national minority. In the article, four European elections 2004, 2009, 2014, and 2019 were considered. The research hypothesizes is that the Ukrainian national minority could have a distinct voting behaviour from their region of permanent living and voted obviously for the representatives of liberal and leftist political forces rather than for far-right and right, or even far-left candidates on the elections to the European Parliament. In the years 2004-2019, an interesting phenomenon could be observed in the elections to the European Parliament in the area of communes inhabited by the Ukrainian population. In the «Ukrainian» municipalities located in the northern part of Poland, where the electorate was rather liberal (Civic Platform) or possibly anti-system (Self-Defence) the election results did not differ from the rest of the regions. This phenomenon was inherent in both the West Pomeranian and Warmia-Masurian voivodships. On the other hand, in the Komańcza commune, which is located in the Subcarpathian voivodship, in which the conservative electorate has been the strongest, the results of the voting in the “Ukrainian” commune were significantly different from other communes of the region. In other words, the results of the elections in Komańcza were much more similar to the results obtained in northern and western Poland than to the results in the South-Eastern Poland. The article concludes that, in general, those municipalities, where the citizens of Ukrainian descent consist at least 10% of the overall population, vote for more liberal parties to the European Parliament. Instead, the support of rightwing political parties like Law and Justice, Kukiz’15, Korvin Confederation as a right-wing parties is much lower. Even during elections to the European Parliament in 2019, Law and Justice, victorious in the rest of the country, evidently had lower support in “Ukrainian” municipalities. The Civic Platform is perceived as a much more moderate party, guaranteeing, in their opinion, representatives of the Ukrainian minority a greater sense of security and comfort of living in the Polish state.

Do parties’ representation failures affect populist attitudes? Evidence from a multinational survey experiment

The rise of populist forces in Western democracies is often linked to representation failures. However, to date we lack causally identified evidence for the effect of parties’ representation on populist attitudes. We address this lacuna through a survey experiment conducted in 12 European Union countries involving 23,257 subjects. Our experiment manipulates citizens’ perceptions of being represented by national parties in the 2019 European elections campaign, and identifies the effect of perceived representation on populist attitudes. The results reveal that poor representation increases populist attitudes in respondents that did not express such attitudes pretreatment, but has no effect among those who were already populist. We demonstrate that this effect is primarily due to parties’ representation failures triggering citizens’ anti-elite sentiment.