Pieter de Wilde

• PhD
• Professor at University of Groningen

Examining (de-)politicization as an actor-driven phenomenon, this study asks: How and to what extent do actors in the public sphere attempt to (de-)politicize European Union (EU) policies? (De-)politicization is understood not only as a process but also as the deliberate framing of debates over EU issues at a domestic level. This paper conceptualiz...

This paper examines the politicisation of EU trade policy at the level of the EU's Member States. In an effort to study the variation of politicisation across the EU, going beyond the degree to which an issue is politicised, we map out the debates surrounding EU free trade agreements (TTIP and CETA) in the media of Denmark, France, Germany, Italy,...

A burgeoning literature documents the emergence of a new globalization cleavage in Western Europe, centered around the issues of immigration and European integration. We investigate to what extent the globalization cleavage has crystallized by studying the alignment of preferences regarding open borders, their connection to more fundamental element...

The European Union (EU) is in search of a new narrative to create a sense of common purpose, but it is unclear around which values that narrative should be built. To analyse how different narratives resonate in Europe's public spheres, this article presents a novel dataset based on claims analysis of newspaper articles from Germany, France, Italy,...

Stronger European Union (EU) competencies come with greater media presence, according to existing cross-sectional comparisons. While presence comes with the power to influence public discourse, we know little about how it affects the overall tone of public discourse. This article investigates the effect of the empowerment of EU institutions on medi...

Report addressed to the European Parliament and the Commission on policy recommendations and on Treaty changes and amendments to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights

Contributions in this thematic issue focus explicitly on citizens and their online engagement with European politics. For social media research in the European Union, citizens remain an understudied actor type in comparison with political elites or news organizations. The reason, we argue, is four key challenges facing social media research in the...

Communication Strategy of the EU for best practice and policy recommendations: Work Package 15 - Deliverable 1

The narratives that the EU exists to create peace or prosperity are losing force. The first one does not resonate so much with younger generations. The second has suffered a major blow during the Euro crisis. In response, key actors in the EU - including notably French President Emmanuel Macron - have pushed a new narrative: A Europe that Protects....

This paper analyzes recent trends of democratic backsliding within the European Union (EU). While some scholars highlight threats to the rule of law and judicial independence as the key development and problem, others focus on elite discourse and partisan competition. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the essence of democratic backsliding by a...

Research on policy responsiveness of the European Union has adopted the systemic model from national contexts. This focusses on the static congruence or the dynamic adaptation of aggregated policy output and similarly aggregated public opinion. Approaches in this vein provide relevant insights and uncover a surprising degree of EU responsiveness. Y...

This handbook outlines the logistical plan and coding guide for the execution of the Representative Claims Analysis (RCA) of media discourse on democracy and the rule of law in the European Union for the RECONNECT project. The proposed analysis will produce a dataset informing a greater understanding of existing perceptions of democracy and the rul...

Cambridge Core - Political Sociology - The Struggle Over Borders - edited by Pieter de Wilde

How does media coverage of European Union (EU) politics affect the process of European integration? This contribution investigates the nature and logic of media coverage of EU affairs and identifies the news value criteria that underpin it. It subsequently confronts the key causal mechanisms and processes of grand theories of European integration w...

All kinds of actors, elected and unelected, make claims to represent certain constituencies. This article sheds new light on what this practice of representative claims-making might imply for the legitimacy of the liberal world order. It develops a quality of representation index at the level of representative claims and introduces a novel dataset....

Recent societal conflicts over immigration, free trade and EU membership testify to the controversiality of globalization in Western societies. Brexit, Trump, the refugee crisis, and the debate around transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP) are clear illustrations of the salience of globalization in politics. Many argue that neolibera...

Can structural conflict over globalization be observed outside Western Europe? When does such a cosmopolitan–communitarian cleavage emerge? These questions are highly relevant as similar conflicts over open borders seem to take place in various countries. To answer these questions, we analyze electoral competition on issues related to globalization...

While national parliaments in the European Union have learned to internalize new opportunities for influence given to them by the Lisbon Treaty, European integration has evolved and places ever more serious demands and constraints on domestic legislatures. Following the euro crisis, key decisions about national macro-economic policies are taken in...

ParlSpeech contains full-text vectors of more than 3.9 million plenary speeches in the key legislative chambers of the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, covering periods between 22 and 28 years. Speeches are annotated with date, speaker and party. This release note provides a more detailed gui...

Debates about the EU's democratic legitimacy put national parliaments into the spotlight. Do they enhance democratic accountability by offering visible debates and electoral choice about multilevel governance? To support such accountability, we argue, saliency of EU affairs in the plenary ought to be responsive to developments in EU governance, has...

Economic, cultural and political systems formerly bounded by the borders of nation states are increasingly globalized. Politicians, civil society and other societal actors engage in publically debating issues related to globalization. Whether conflicts consolidate to form a stable cleavage depends among other factors on the extent to which they bec...

This volume argues that the crisis of the European Union is not merely a fiscal crisis but reveals and amplifies deeper flaws in the structure of the EU itself. It is a multidimensional crisis of the economic, legal and political cornerstones of European integration and marks the end of the technocratic mode of integration which has been dominant s...

This contribution assesses the explanatory power of European integration theory for the politicisation of specific European Union (EU) issues in mass media and national parliaments. By comparing debates on the EU budget in the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland, on three different budget negotiations, in newspapers and in plenary parliamentary sessio...

The politicisation of European governance has become an important subject in debates about the institutional design, day-to-day decision-making and democratic legitimacy of the European Union. This special issue takes stock of this development of politicisation research, including the theoretical development as well as the rapidly expanding body of...

Theoretical debate about the effects of politicisation on the democratic legitimacy of the European Union has tended to focus on the potential of conflict between European political parties or member state governments. At the same time, empirical sociological studies demonstrate that controversy about Europe continues to unfold primarily within nat...

Advocates of a global democratic parliament have expressed hopes that this would not only legitimize global governance in procedural terms, but also bring about more cosmopolitan policies. They point to the European Parliament as an example of a successful real existing democratic parliament beyond the state with cosmopolitan intent. We analyse ple...

European integration has become increasingly controversial since the beginning of the 1990s (Eichenberg and Dalton 2007; Hooghe and Marks 2009; de Wilde and Zürn 2012; Statham and Trenz 2013b). That is, mass publics have come to pay more attention to political decision making within the European Union (EU) framework and at the same time seem more c...

Dieses WZB Diskussionspapier befasst sich mit der im Rahmen des Brückenprojekts „Die politische Soziologie des Kosmopolitismus und Kommunitarismus“ durchgeführten representative claims analyis. Es dient als methodologische Grundlage für die Interpretation der hierbei entstandenen Datensammlung sowie den aus ihr folgenden Erkenntnissen. Darüber hina...

This contribution assesses the explanatory power of European integration theory for the politicisation of specific European Union (EU) issues in mass media and national parliaments. By comparing debates on the EU budget in the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland, on three different budget negotiations, in newspapers and in plenary parliamentary sessio...

Does the increasing politicisation of Europe signify a step towards the legitimation of the Union? This could be the case if the increased public intensity of debate and polarisation of opinion brought about by politicisation do not fragment the audience and if arguments presented in public are sufficiently clear about the desired nature of the pol...

Globalization pressures result in a new ideological conflict among Europeans. We use detailed items from the Eurobarometer survey on issues of immigration and European integration that measure the ideological perspective underpinning positions toward the EU. This provides a fine-grained analysis of the ideologies underlying the poles of the new glo...

This contribution presents a detailed methodological discussion on the empirical study of political representation. It confronts Saward's conceptualization of the representative claim with the method of claims analysis, developed by Koopmans and Statham. Drawing on Saward, the contribution emphasizes the theoretical need to study the act of represe...

The spreading phenomenon of Euroscepticism is manifested in critical practices in discourse that oppose European integration. This paper explores Euroscepticism as an element of discourse, which cannot only be measured as party positions or individual attitudes. Based on this understanding, our argument is twofold. Firstly, Euroscepticism relates t...

The current political climate in the European Union, referred to as the ‘constraining dissensus’, may place negotiations on the multiannual EU budget centre stage. Media framing of EU budget negotiations as conflict between member states may reinforce the constraining dissensus by resonating with exclusive national identity. In contrast, media emph...

Following the failure of the Constitutional Treaty, executives of European Union (EU) Member States and the European Commission tried to take European integration as a political issue as much off the agenda as possible and limit involvement of citizens in EU decision‐making. This article assesses the viability of this attempt to combat politicizati...

Difference on European Union issues expressed in Europe’s public spheres carries potential benefits for democracy in Europe through stimulating a sense of belonging and political engagement among European citizens. This potential lies in the (re)construction of in-groups and out-groups and in the articulation of meaningful political choice. By doin...

This study provides an empirical comparative case study of representative claims-making in EU budget negotiations. Two questions are addressed in this paper. First, the paper asks what the role of elected or appointed partisan politicians is in comparison to other representatives. This question is relevant given the reported increasing importance o...

This paper discusses the effects of the Early Warning Mechanism, introduced in the Treaty of Lisbon, on democracy in the European Union. It argues that the mechanism does not contribute to democracy in the EU for three reasons. First, it does not strengthen existing channels of delegation and accountability in the EU. Instead of contributing to the...

In the literature on European integration, politicization as concept is often attributed major importance. This article shows how the literature variously discusses the politicization of European Union (EU) institutions, the politicization of EU decision‐making processes or the politicization of EU issues. Similarly, the literature attributes three...

This article asks how ex ante and ex post control mechanisms structuring the involvement of national parliaments in European Union (EU) policy-formulation affect the scope of conflict and visibility of parliamentary debates. Based on democratic theory, partisan conflict and high visibility are normatively preferable. The effects of control mechanis...

This article empirically investigates how media coverage of European Union (EU) policy-formulation affects the involvement of national parliaments in these processes. The literature has variously argued that the involvement of national parliaments in EU policy-formulation is unrelated to media coverage, that media strengthen the hand of backbencher...

The German Federal Constitutional Court’s ruling is based on a nation state-bound understanding of political representation which does not take the EU’s compounded system into account. Furthermore, it confounds questions of voting structure with questions about the pouvoir constituent. Its emphasis on the equality of peoples over the equality of ci...

This paper analyses the prominence, content and justifications of Euroscepticism as a form of EU legitimacy contestation. Support of and opposition to European integration have so far been mainly measured through the positions of political parties or citizens’ attitudes through public opinion polls. Against this reliance on static indicators, we fo...

The current Eurosceptic political climate in the European Union, known as the ‘constraining dissensus’, may place negotiations on the multiannual EU budget center-stage. If media portray political conflict about the budget as international polarization pitting Member States against each other or against European Union (EU) institutions, it may incr...

Eurosceptic parties won a clear victory in the 2009 European Parliament elections. Contrary to the negative reactions from some pro-European politicians and political scientists, this essay argues that the electoral success of Eurosceptic parties will neither endanger the process of European integration nor keep the Euro-pean Parliament from workin...

Scholarly debate on party-based Euroscepticism centers on the questions of how to define, measure and explain Euroscepticism. As a starting point, this paper observes that studies on Euroscepticism either focus on the positions of individual parties on issues of European integration or on the character of public discourse in different member states...

The spreading phenomenon of Euroscepticism relates to particular discursive formations within the battlefield of collective identities that is opened by European integration. This paper first aims to highlight the reactionary nature of Euroscepticism. Secondly, it argues for understanding Euroscepticism as a discursive formation in the public spher...

This paper asks how ex ante and ex post control mechanisms structuring the involvement of national parliaments in EU policy-formulation affect the size and scope of conflict of parliamentary debates. The direct and indirect effects of control mechanisms are assessed in a comparative case study on plenary parliamentary debates in the Danish Folketin...

Scholarly debate on party-based Euroscepticism centers on the questions of how to define, measure and explain Euroscepticism. As a starting point, this paper observes that studies on Euroscepticism either focus on the positions of individual parties on issues of European integration or on the character of public discourse in different member states...

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between media coverage of EU policy-formulation and the involvement of national parliaments in these processes. The literature has variously argued that the activity of national parliaments in EU policy-formulation is unrelated to media coverage, that media strengthen the hand of backbenchers and...

This conceptual paper provides a working definition of politicisation of European integration, based on a literature review. Politicisation has often been used by political scientists interested in European integration We observe that research using the concept is rarely interested in the process of politicisation, but rather in its product. By ans...