The use of social media in EU policy communication and implications for the emergence of a European public sphere

Abstract

Cohesion Policy accounts for the European Union main investment budget and seeks to strengthen economic, social and territorial cohesion. While accomplishments in this field are constantly measured, European citizens are not always aware of policy’s impact and of the role the EU plays therein. This issue is relevant, as communication of social policy is central to the emergence of the European public sphere, an acknowledged condition to foster European integration.

In this work we aim at advancing research on the European public sphere through an analysis of the social media communication of EU cohesion policy by ten LMAs. We build on a bottom-up construction of shared meaning structures through semi-automatic techniques of analysis and highlight three main results: first, ‘horizontal Europeanization’ takes place on social media; second, Europeanization occurs both as the spontaneous integration of shared discontent expressed by citizens, and by the institutionalization of top-down procedures of communication adopted by LMAs; Third, a cluster of topics articulated internationally and conveying a negative attitude towards the EU funding scheme suggests that, counter-intuitively, Euroskepticism seems to facilitate the building of a European public sphere.