What’s the talk in Brussels? Leveraging daily news coverage to measure issue attention in the European Union

Research on issue attention in the European Union has focused on the prominence of EU integration in domestic politics and media and, at EU level, on the salience of individual issues and legislative files, often in relation to lobbying. Existing EU-level measures of issue saliency, though, are limi...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:European Union politics 2020-06, Vol.21 (2), p.204-232
Main Authors: Ovádek, Michal, Lampach, Nicolas, Dyevre, Arthur
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accession
Classification
Domestic politics
Lobbying
Media coverage
News media
Validity
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Research on issue attention in the European Union has focused on the prominence of EU integration in domestic politics and media and, at EU level, on the salience of individual issues and legislative files, often in relation to lobbying. Existing EU-level measures of issue saliency, though, are limited in scope and periodicity and tend to reflect the policy priorities of a single institutional actor rather than that of the broader EU elite sphere. We present an alternative measure of issue attention leveraging the quasi-institutional nature of the Agence Europe daily bulletin which provides comprehensive but independent news coverage of EU affairs. We use text-mining techniques, including dynamic topic modelling, in combination with manual classification to map issue prevalence between 1979 and 2018. In addition to reporting validation results, we illustrate how our measure relates to other indicators of EU agenda formation and explain how researchers can make use of our new dataset.
ISSN:1465-1165
1741-2757
DOI:10.1177/1465116520902530