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Content archived on 2024-06-18

How to involve the European citizenry in European politics? Emotions, media discourse, and mobilisation

Objective

The research project sets out to describe the mechanism that explains how political entrepreneurs created mass mobilisations by engaging European citizens against Haider's FPÖ, against the Bolkestein directive, and against Turkish membership. The lack of citizen participation is often assumed to be the main problem of democracy at the European level. The recent mass mobilisations are puzzling, as not much has changed in the circumstances that were thought to cause the apathy of citizens towards European politics. Contrary to the actor- and structure-centred accounts found in the European integration literature, this research project focuses on the activating quality of emotionally-loaded media discourse by incorporating insights from media effect theory and collective action theory. While it is known how citizens become politically engaged with national politics, the peculiarity of multi-level European decision-making, and, especially, the profoundly different political opportunity structure for mobilisation on European issues need to be taken into account.

Knowledge on the necessary circumstances for engaging citizens with European politics is elicited by comparing three issues with high levels of mobilisation to three similar issues with low levels of mobilisation. Media discourse and citizens' political behaviour in Germany, France and Switzerland is analysed via a qualitative and quantitative content analysis and by consulting social movement databases. The non-EU Switzerland serves as a validity check. Subsequently, an experiment with a pre-test/post-test design is held to test the main independent variables related to emotionally-loaded media discourse, while controlling for the relevant intervening variables. By disclosing whether politicisation is the prerogative of Eurosceptics, or may lead to the kind of contestation beneficial to democratic politics, this interdisciplinary project will disclose the prospects for civic participation in European politics.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

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Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

FP7-PEOPLE-2010-IEF
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MC-IEF - Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)

Coordinator

FREIE UNIVERSITAET BERLIN
EU contribution
€ 162 163,20
Address
KAISERSWERTHER STRASSE 16-18
14195 Berlin
Germany

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Region
Berlin Berlin Berlin
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

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