Katjana Gattermann

• PhD
• Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam

With the introduction of the so-called Spitzenkandidaten procedure, by which European party families nominate lead candidates for the post of President of the European Commission for European elections, the European Parliament (EP) sought to raise voter awareness and engagement by personalizing the campaigns. This article studies candidate recognit...

This article investigates the impact of pan-European candidates in European Parliament election campaigns. It focusses on the two 2019 nominees for the European Greens, who were Dutch and German, respectively. We conducted a pre-registered experiment in the Netherlands and Germany in early April 2019 to test the effects of (non-)personalized campai...

The personalization of politics, whereby politicians increasingly become the main focus of political processes, is a prominent phenomenon in modern democracies that has received considerable scholarly attention in national politics. However, little is known about the scope, causes and consequences of personalization in European Union politics, alth...

When reporting on election results, the media declare parties as election ‘winners’ or ‘losers’, which has important consequences for voter perceptions and government formation. This paper investigates news coverage of parties’ electoral performance in proportional representation systems, in which election results are often less clear‐cut compared...

p>It is well known that voters’ evaluation of candidates on leadership traits influences their overall candidate assessment and vote choice (i.e., leader effects). It remains unclear, however, whether positive or negative leader trait evaluations are most influential. We argue that especially in current-day political reality—in which ideological an...

The link between citizens' and representatives' preferences is central to representative democracy. Research on representation of citizens' preferences in the European Parliament (EP) has primarily concentrated on national political parties and candidates. We ask how well transnational EP party groups and members of the EP (MEPs) represent their vo...

Growing evidence exists about the importance of dark personality traits – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in political leaders, broadly leading to heightened political aggressiveness and partisan conflict. Building on this expanding research agenda, we study the possible association between dark personality in politicians and deepene...

Media criticism is a crucial part of meta-journalistic discourse, ensuring that journalists adhere to their democratic functions, such as informing citizens in an honest and complete manner. However, the profession increasingly faces hostile, nonevidence-based attacks from politicians that attempt to strategically fuel distrust among citizens and d...

Across Europe, Public Service Media (PSM) are increasingly subject to bias accusations in public debates. Excluding academic attention for actual bias in news content, research into the nature of bias accusations is limited. This article studies bias accusations against Dutch PSM in online discourse. Through a qualitative content analysis of tweets...

European Union (EU) political actors have been heavily affected by the so-called disinformation crisis, leading to intense worries about how EU citizens may be guaranteed access to trustworthy information in the years to come. While there is increasing research on how EU officials, platforms, and political parties react to the threat of disinformat...

This thematic issue deals with the “negative” side of politics, more specifically with dynamics of political aggressiveness and ideological opposition in voters and elites. Why do candidates “go negative” on their rivals? To what extent are voters entrenched into opposing camps parted by political tribalism? And are these dynamics related to the (d...

The personalization of politics, whereby politicians increasingly become the main focus of political processes, is a prominent phenomenon in modern democracies that has received considerable scholarly attention in national politics. However, little is known about the scope, causes, and consequences of personalization in European Union politics, alt...

The personalization of politics, whereby politicians increasingly become the main focus of political processes, is a prominent phenomenon in modern democracies that has received considerable scholarly attention in national politics. However, little is known about the scope, causes, and consequences of personalization in European Union politics, alt...

The personalization of politics, whereby politicians increasingly become the main focus of political processes, is a prominent phenomenon in modern democracies that has received considerable scholarly attention in national politics. However, little is known about the scope, causes, and consequences of personalization in European Union politics, alt...

The personalization of politics, whereby politicians increasingly become the main focus of political processes, is a prominent phenomenon in modern democracies that has received considerable scholarly attention in national politics. However, little is known about the scope, causes, and consequences of personalization in European Union politics, alt...

The personalization of politics, whereby politicians increasingly become the main focus of political processes, is a prominent phenomenon in modern democracies that has received considerable scholarly attention in national politics. However, little is known about the scope, causes, and consequences of personalization in European Union politics, alt...

The personalization of politics, whereby politicians increasingly become the main focus of political processes, is a prominent phenomenon in modern democracies that has received considerable scholarly attention in national politics. However, little is known about the scope, causes, and consequences of personalization in European Union politics, alt...

The personalization of politics, whereby politicians increasingly become the main focus of political processes, is a prominent phenomenon in modern democracies that has received considerable scholarly attention in national politics. However, little is known about the scope, causes, and consequences of personalization in European Union politics, alt...

The personalization of politics, whereby politicians increasingly become the main focus of political processes, is a prominent phenomenon in modern democracies that has received considerable scholarly attention in national politics. However, little is known about the scope, causes, and consequences of personalization in European Union politics, alt...

The personalization of politics, whereby politicians increasingly become the main focus of political processes, is a prominent phenomenon in modern democracies that has received considerable scholarly attention in national politics. However, little is known about the scope, causes, and consequences of personalization in European Union politics, alt...

We ask whether and why European political parties receive election news coverage abroad and investigate this phenomenon by combining theoretical stipulations regarding the politicisation of European integration and the horizontal Europeanisation of national public spheres. Based on a content analysis of 64 newspapers in 16 European Union countries...

Leader evaluations are a crucial aspect in representative democracy. We analyse the patterns, antecedents and consequences of European Union leader evaluations against the backdrop of the 2019 European Parliament elections in ten countries. The article shows, firstly, that leader evaluations are unidimensional, both among voters with low and high k...

This special issue focuses on the consequences of the heightened conflict between member states and increased politicization of European affairs for electoral politics in the European Union. In this introduction we begin by outlining three important developments that fuelled the politicization: (a) the common currency; (b) the increased pushback on...

The dominant perspective of European Parliament (EP) elections is that these are second-order national elections where little is at stake. This Special Issue asks whether this perspective is still valid in view of increased politicization of European integration and in view of the higher turnout levels at the last EP elections. This introduction pr...

COVID-19 has important implications for European solidarity. In this study, it is proposed to consider the role of information and media use for citizens’ attitudes towards European solidarity given the accelerated information supply alongside an increase in information-seeking behaviour among citizens. These factors have previously received little...

What is the effect of politicisation on EU representation? We empirically test two competing views through a focus on party-voter congruence, i.e. whether parties share the policy preferences of their voters. The first perspective expects that the process of politicisation –either through party or media contestation– would improve party-voter agree...

Dieses Kapitel untersucht, wie viel Aufmerksamkeit die Spitzenkandidaten im Vorfeld der Wahlen in sozialen Medien, dem länderübergreifenden Nachrichtenblog Euractiv.com und Druckausgaben von Tageszeitungen aus Irland, Frankreich, den Niederlanden, Deutschland und Italien erhielten. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Spitzenkandidaten 2019 nicht wesent...

This article examines the overtime variation in content and style of European Parliament election campaign posters in the Netherlands and Italy. We put forward several hypotheses that tap the professionalization of political communication against the backdrop of politicization of EU affairs. Our sample comprises 333 posters for a total of 59 partie...

Online_Appendix_rev – Supplemental material for Mediated Personalization of Executive European Union Politics: Examining Patterns in the Broadsheet Coverage of the European Commission, 1992–2016

This study examines the extent to which politicians' visibility in traditional news coverage explains individual politicians' visibility on social media, and vice versa. We also explore whether these relationships depend on commonly identified characteristics of individual politicians. We collected data for all elected candidates from the 2012 Dutc...

The personalization of politics is a popular thesis but often challenged when it comes to media personalization. While previous research compared the prominence of different types of political actors across national political contexts, this article situates its research in the context of European Union (EU) politics and, thereby, studies similar re...

We study the personalization of voting behaviour in European Parliament elections. We argue that information from the media is crucial for providing linkages between candidates and voters. Moreover, we contend that candidates can serve as information short-cuts given the complexity of European Union politics. We use a four-wave Dutch panel survey a...

This chapter investigates the extent to which transnational dimensions of Euroscepticism have become visible in the European public sphere. It does so by comparing the news visibility of Eurosceptic MEP candidates during the 2009 and 2014 election campaigns in nine countries from the North, South, East and West of Europe. The underlying rationale o...

In this research note, we propose studying a new trend of Europeanisation in national parliaments within the European Union (EU). We argue that further integration, combined with the opportunities and challenges presented by the Lisbon Treaty and the financial crisis, created pressure on national parliaments to expand the scrutiny process beyond Eu...

The 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections were characterised by a novel element in European Union (EU) politics. For the first time, the major European party families put forward top candidates for President of the European Commission, the so-called Spitzenkandidaten. This paper tests whether this innovation had the potential to—at least partiall...

This issue brings together papers that focus on the question of whether and in which ways the 2014 European Parliament elections were different from previous ones. This is important from the point of view of emerging scholarship on changes in the EU and from the point of view of the self-proclaimed ‘This time it’s different!’ slogan from the Parlia...

The Early Warning System gives national parliaments the right to intervene in European Union policy-making. This article investigates their incentives to submit reasoned opinions. It analyses the reactions of 40 parliamentary chambers to 411 draft legislative acts between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2013 by ReLogit models. The article argues tha...

The Treaty of Lisbon has strengthened the rights of both the European Parliament (EP) and national parliaments in the European Union (EU) decision-making process. The EP has benefited from greater legislative rights and extended veto powers, which ultimately has implications for EU citizens, since most legislative decisions affect them directly. EU...

Im Jahr 2014 stellten die Europäischen Parteifamilien zur Europawahl erstmals Spitzenkandidaten für das Amt des Kommissionspräsidenten auf. Folgt man der politikwissenschaft lichen Literatur so hat diese Art von Personalisierung des Wahlkampfs das Potenzial dem Europäischen Demokratiedefi zit teilweise entgegenzuwirken. In ihrer Funktion als Leitme...

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) represent their citizens in European Union policy making, having the power to approve, amend or reject the near majority of legislation. The media inform EU citizens about their representatives and are able to hold them publicly accountable. However, we know little about whether, and to what extent, MEPs ar...

Few political communication studies deal with the European Parliament during nonelection times even though it takes decisions in a wide range of policy areas. This study examines the patterns and external drivers of European Parliament broadsheet coverage by analysing 2155 articles from six European Union countries during a routine period (2005–200...

The European Parliament has often been accused of its inability to link to European citizens. This article employs quantitative measures to investigate levels of congruence between individual MEPs and their voters on core policy issues following the 2009 EP elections. Operationalizing congruence as a ‘many-to-one’ relationship, it suggests that on...

National parliaments in the European Union initially responded to the challenge of scrutinising EU legislation by establishing European Affairs Committees (EACs). This paper argues that further integration, combined with the opportunities and challenges presented by the Lisbon Treaty and financial crisis, create pressure to expand the scrutiny proc...

The case of SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) has generated a heated discussion between the European Parliament, the Council, and the Commission concerning the data exchange via bank transfers between the EU and the US. However, although the case had attracted opponents and critics from within the European Parliame...