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Online Appendix for “Politicizing Europe in hard times:
Conflicts over Europe in France in a long-term perspective, 1974-2012”
Published in the Journal of European Integration
Swen Hutter and Alena Kerscher
February 2014
Method and data
At first, we describe in more detail our strategy of data collection. As stated in the
article, we present here new and original data based on a large-scale research project on
the politicization of Europe financed by German Research Council (DFG) (project
leaders: Edgar Grande [University of Munich] and Hanspeter Kriesi [European
University Institute, Florence]). The dataset covers all elections since 1974 and 2012 in
France. We decided to analyse presidential elections, because they are considered to be
more important than parliamentary elections (Bell 2000; Knapp 2004). We chose to
look at the period before the first round of these presidential elections, because smaller
parties are no longer represented in the second round. In our research, we made use of
the approach applied by Kriesi et al. (2012; 2008) to the analysis of political conflict in
Western Europe.
The articles were selected from Le Monde (France). The data come from
newspaper content, rather than from television, since newspapers – and above all the
quality press – report more extensively on political matters. The selection of only one
newspaper is first of all a pragmatic choice. However, previous research based on
several newspapers has found only small differences between national newspapers
when focusing on a rather broad aggregation level of issues and time (see Koopmans
and Statham 2010; Kriesi et al. 2008). For example, the Kriesi et al. (2008) project was
based on Le Monde and the tabloid newspaper Le Parisien. Even between these two
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fairly different newspapers, the salience of a set of twelve issue categories, as well as
the visibility of the various political parties is highly correlated.
From Le Monde, we selected all articles that were published within two months
before the relevant national Election Day and report on the electoral contest and
national politics more generally. The newspaper editions are online available since the
1990s. For the elections before 1995 we had to select the relevant articles manually in
the print versions. Out of all these articles, we then identified those articles that cover a
“European integration issue”. We defined European integration issues broadly, to cover
the full range of sub-issues associated with the integration process, and did not
predetermine our empirical results by narrowly specifying the range of European
integration issues. Nowadays, the European Union is active in virtually every policy
field. Thus, almost any political issue can become a “European” issue, if European
institutions are – or should be – involved. Following Bartolini (2005: 310), the
definition covers general orientations (e.g. strengthening European integration),
constitutive issues (e.g. sovereignty of national central banks) as well as more policyoriented or isomorphic issues related to European integration (e.g. agricultural policies
on the European level). It is important to note that we only include policy-oriented
issues in our analysis when the political actors explicitly refer to the issue’s European
dimension. This broader definition of issues related to European integration is a key
difference to other work that focuses on a more limited set of (usually constitutive)
issues (e.g. Kriesi 2007; Statham and Trenz 2012).
However, we are not primarily interested in the salience of “Europe” in terms of
media coverage. Rather, our main focus lies on the political contestation among
political actors. That is why we applied the relational content analysis method
developed by Kleinnijenhuis and colleagues (e.g., Kleinnijenhuis et al. 1997). As stated,
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the unit of analysis is not the whole article, but the “core sentence”, which consists of
the most basic pieces of information of a grammatical sentence. More precisely, we
focus on relations between two political actors (at least one being a party actor), with a
thematic reference to a European issue (actor-actor sentences), as well as on relations
between a party actor and a European issue (actor-issue sentences). Party actors cover
all actors (individual or collective actors) that are linked to a national political party
(incl. candidates, party leaders, party officials in government, party members). The
direction of the relationship between the two objects is quantified using a scale from -1
to +1 with three intermediary positions, where -1 indicates a critique or rejection of the
actor or issue and +1 an affirmative evaluation. The data used for this article covers
2,872 core sentences with a share of 17.1 percent actor-actor and 82.9 percent actorissue sentences.
We coded the actors and issues in great detail. For the purposes of this analyses,
we regrouped them in the following way: regarding actors, we first distinguished
between actors belonging to the government/executive (ranging from the local to the
national level), and actors who do not; second, we aggregated all party-affiliated actors
(governmental and non-governmental) into the respective parties that they belong to;
regarding issues, we used a coding scheme with more than three hundred different
categories. Being interested in the salience and degree of polarization, we aggregated
these categories into four general categories: (a) general orientations, (b) deepening and
intervention in economic policy fields, (c) deepening and intervention in non-economic
policy fields, and (d) widening. The typology combines information on the very nature
of European issues (Bartolini 2005) and the more substantive contents being discussed.
Deepening and widening are the key sub-categories of constitutive issues, whereas
intervention refers to policy-related questions. For the second, the debate focuses no
longer on whether competences should be shifted to the European level or not, but
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rather on how Europe should use its competences. The distinction between economic
and non-economic policy fields distinguishes fields closely related to the establishment
and re-regulation of the internal market, whereas non-economic refers to integration and
intervention in all other types of policy fields (essentially this is what the Maastricht
treaty covered in the second and third pillars).
We extended Kleinnijenhuis’ approach by coding frames, defined as patterns of
justification (see also Helbling et al. 2010; Statham and Trenz 2012, p. 125ff.). Unlike
most other studies, we coded frames at the core sentence level, just as actors and issues.
Most importantly, we distinguish between “utilitarian frames” and “cultural frames”.
The first type consists of arguments referring to particular interests, as well as to
efficiency and cost-benefit (Lerch and Schwellnus 2006, p. 306). Economic
considerations belong to this frame type. For example, an actor might argue that EUmembership leads to harmful competition in the job market, or that liberalization of the
service sector is economically beneficial. The second type (cultural frames) refers to
ideas and values that are considered by political actors to be inherent to a particular
community. Among them are nationalistic-ethnic frames, which make a point for a
culturally homogenous society in order to uphold an exclusive national identity (e.g.,
statements that deplore the loss of unique national identities and values, or express
xenophobic attitudes). However, cultural frames also cover arguments related to
multicultural-inclusive (e.g. cultural openness and the peaceful coexistence of cultural
and religious groups), or to moral-universalist values (e.g., basic civil rights, political
rights or international solidarity). Very often, there are also several justifications found
for one particular issue position. Therefore, we coded up to three frames per core
sentence. We have information on the justification frames used by the actors for 55.4
percent of all actor-issue sentences. Since we coded up to three frames per actor-issue
sentence, we can draw on 2,077 coded justification frames in our analyses.
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To illustrate our approach, Table A.1 shows two exemplary core sentences based
on the same grammatical sentence.
Table A.1: Examples of core sentences
“Minister X (Party Y) supports common measures to fight youth unemployment as the young
are most affected by the new social divisions brought about by the crisis. At the same time, s/he
opposes Turkish accession as s/he fears higher unemployment and the growing influence of
Islam in Europe.”
core
sentence
actor
type
actor
organization
direction
(quality)
No. 1
National
executive
Party Y
+1
National
executive
Party Y
-1
No. 2
issue
Common
unemployment
policy
Turkish
accession
1st frame
(category)
social
security
(economic)
prosperity
(economic)
2nd frame
(category)
Islamization
(cultural)
Let us add some more details about the specific indicators used to construct the
politicization index as well as on the benchmark. For each dimension, we rely on one
key indicator. We are aware of the fact that there are alternative possibilities measuring
our variables, in particular issue salience. We tested various alternatives; however, we
found no substantial differences between them and the ones we use in this article. For
matters of clarity and simplification, we therefore decided to restrict our analysis to one
indicator for each variable. To begin with, salience is measured by the share of core
sentences on European integration in percent of all (potentially) coded core sentences
related to any political issue. For the expansion of actors involved, we propose an
indicator that measures the share of non-executive actor statements (e.g., by opposition
leaders or parliamentary spokespersons) in percent of all coded statements related to
European integration. All individuals were re-coded as being either an executive or a
non-executive party actor during a given electoral campaign. For example, even if the
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is introduced as the party leader of the UMP in a
press article during his campaign for re-election in 2012, he is coded as belonging to the
group of executive politicians.
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Following Kriesi et al. (2012), the indicator for polarization of party positions is
based on Taylor and Hermann’s (1971) index, which was originally designed to
measure the degree of left-right polarization in a party system. This measure shows how
strongly the actors’ positions differ from one another on a given set of issues. Since
actor positions are always measured on scales ranging from -1 to +1, the distance to the
average (and our measure of polarization) can range between 0 and 1.
The polarization of positions on a given issue category is computed as follow:
K
POLARIZATION 

k
x
k
 x 2
k 1
Where
is the salience of a particular issue category for party k,
position of party k on this issue category, and
is the
is the weighted average position of all
parties, where weights are provided by the party-specific salience of the issue category.
Since European integration issues were regrouped into four broad issue categories, our
key indicator of polarization is the average polarization measure for the four issue
categories weighted by the salience of the corresponding category.
In a final step, we combined the different indicators in a single politicization
index: politicization = salience x (expansion of actors + polarization). For the
calculation of the index, the salience measure runs from 0 to 100 (percent), whereas
both expansion of actors and polarization are based on a scale which ranges from 0 to 1.
Therefore, the final politicization index can potentially run from 0 (not politicized at all)
to 200 (most politicized). Of course, the maximum of 200 is only a hypothetical
number, since it would imply that European integration is the only issue debated during
an election campaign, only non-executive politicians take part in the debate, and we find
two camps of the same size at both extremes. Realistic values are much lower.
Following recent suggestions by Green-Pedersen (2012), and by Hutter and
Grande (2013), we compare the politicization of Europe with a broader set of issues.
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More precisely, we calculated a benchmark by relying on the data of the Kriesi et al.
project (2008, 2012). This data is based on the same coding strategy as the one used in
this article, but it covers a set of twelve issue categories (welfare, budget, economic
liberalism, cultural liberalism, immigration, army, security, culture, ecology,
institutional reform, and infrastructure). For this article, we relied on Kriesi et al.’s
coding of five French presidential election campaigns (1974, 1988, 1995, 2002, and
2007). The descriptive statistics for the benchmark data (mean and maximum value) are
shown in Figure 2 in the article. For example, the average politicization index calculated
for the issue/election combinations in the Kriesi et al. data for France is 6.6, and the
standard deviation is 5.4. Furthermore, the observed maximum was 26.2 (this was
economic liberalism in 1978).
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