Research methods and data collection

Research methods

In my research design, I employed an eclectic multimethod (quantitative and qualitative) approach. I used a nested analysis technique, which began with the large-n statistical test of correlation between variables and then, depending on the results, proceeded to either “model-testing” or “model-building” small-n analysis (Lieberman 2005, 436). The project included large-n analyses that used statistical methods to test correlations between predictors in all EU member states, and small-n analyses that used qualitative methods to trace channels of diffusion between carefully selected case studies. I thus used a triangular design in which the preliminary large-n analyses identified a set of ideal cases (on the regression line) for the small-n analysis, which I used to test the theory and to understand the mechanisms by which ideas diffuse.

I first constructed the data sets for preliminary quantitative analyses (final versions appear in Table A.1 and Table A.3). Next, I turned to qualitative methods in order to confirm or question the validity of the correlations I observed in the large-n analysis. This allowed me to answer open questions of causal order, measurement, and the heterogeneity of cases. I followed the principle that in triangulation “the best use of [small-n analysis] is to leverage its distinct complementarities with [large-n analysis], not to try to implement it with the exact same procedures as one would carry out regression analysis” (Lieberman 2005, 440). In this sense, the small-n analyses also allowed me to observe the mechanisms that connected the independent and dependent variables, aiding my understanding of historical sequence and causal process (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001).

In a paired comparison, I chose Poland and Slovenia because my initial analysis revealed that, among new EU member states, these historically Catholic states were on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of legal standing and societal attitudes toward LGBT people. Both cases had variation on the explanatory and dependent variables. I also studied Germany and the EU as “norm entrepreneur” cases, because I identified them as sources of horizontal and vertical diffusion, respectively. These cases served as mobilizing structures for activism in CEE. They illustrated how ideas diffused, with activists using resources available to them in one context to mobilize in another.

Braving sweltering summer temperatures, 15,000 people gathered in Warsaw to celebrate LGBT visibility on a July weekend in 2010. Everything about that weekend in Warsaw – from the 90-degree temperatures to the parade of rainbow colors – seemed atypical as marchers from Poland and beyond assembled for the annual EuroPride parade. Hosting the regional event was a first for Poland and also for CEE. The European Pride Organizers Association, a group that included Tomasz Bączkowski, wanted the event to come to Warsaw after the 2007 ECtHR decision that had made it illegal to ban public assembly in Poland. This was a moment to reflect on the progress that domestic and transnational activism had made in Poland, and for activists from across Europe to gather and discuss the achievements and obstacles ahead. Yet the parade was met with strong resistance, as an estimated eight counterdemonstrations took place alongside it.

That same month, roughly 300 participants attended the tenth annual Ljubljana Pride, where “there have never been large masses of counterdemonstrations” (interview no. 154). The Ljubljana Pride, whose theme that year was “Enough Waiting on Equal Rights,” proceeded as usual. It received political endorsements from the president of the national assembly, Pavel Ganta, and Ljubljana's mayor, Zoran Jankovič – who has attended in years since. The minister of the interior, Katarina Kresal of the Liberal Democracy of Slovenia party, again marched alongside participants. Novel to the 2010 event was the attendance of several Slovenian celebrities who expressed their support for expanding additional rights to the LGBT community. As had been the case every year since 2001, the Ljubljana Pride looked and felt like a celebration.

The Warsaw and Ljubljana Pride parades employed similar tactics and made related claims. Yet the striking difference between the events lies in the forms and extent of local resistance they provoked. Even the academic panels at the Warsaw “Pride House” in the week leading up to the event drew demonstrators. In Slovenia, political leaders were responsible for the sober public statements in reaction to the parade, but in Poland the stage was left open for religious leaders to respond. Although the EuroPride program included encouraging messages of support from mayors of other cities, such as London and Berlin, Warsaw's mayor, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz of the center-right Civic Platform Party, remained silent.

Introduction

In democratic political systems, elections are the most important institutionalised opportunities to articulate political preferences and opinions, to mobilise citizens and to organise political conflict. Political conflict is expected to be most intensive in the electoral arena, where political parties fight for votes, offices and policies. In Schattschneider's words, this is where the ‘crowd’ comes in because ‘[n]othing attracts a crowd as quickly as a fight’ (Schattschneider 1975 [1960]: 1). In our context, this statement needs to be qualified in two respects. First, it is true that elections have by far the strongest mobilising power compared to national referenda or protest events. However, they have an elitist bias because they are dominated by political parties and marginalise interest groups and organised civil society. Second, while political conflict in integration debates is clearly directed at European issues, elections are open for any political issue. For this reason, conflicts over European integration have to compete with other domestic issues (such as welfare, unemployment, security, etc.) for public attention and for consideration in parties’ electoral strategies. Taken together, elections may provide a favourable political opportunity structure for politicisation, but it is uncertain whether parties actually make use of this opportunity. It is the task of this chapter to examine this empirically.

We concentrate on the national electoral arena, because national elections in the period under consideration were ‘first order elections’. Compared to ‘second order elections’ to the European Parliament (Reif and Schmitt 1980) or to sub-national election contests, they had the highest turnover and parties directed their strongest efforts at them. Moreover, as we argued in the introductory chapter, in the EU's multi-layered polity, national elections are expected to be the most important institutionalised channel to mobilise political conflict beyond the narrow range of the governmental elite. In order to assess the relative importance of conflicts in national election contests, we introduce an empirical benchmark which allows European integration issues to be compared with the most relevant domestic issues. Against this background, the key questions to be answered in this chapter are the following. Has the European integration process become politicised in the last four decades in the electoral arena?

Introduction

The empirical analysis in this book represents the most comprehensive effort so far to understand political conflict over European integration in all its relevant manifestations. Our study covers more than four decades of European integration from the early 1970s to the most critical phases of the euro crisis in six west European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK). We examined public debates on every major step of integration in the past four decades; we have investigated the relevance of European issues in every national election in this period; and we have collected data on protest events on European issues since 1995. If there has been a politicisation of the European integration process in the last four decades, we will have observed it!

In the following, we summarise and discuss the main findings in five steps. First, we give a résumé of the level of politicisation and its development. In this context, we check the validity of our general politicisation hypothesis and of the hypotheses on the individual dimensions of politicisation. In a second step, we provide explanations of the pattern of politicisation which we have observed; third, we analyse the effects of politicisation on the structuring of political conflict in Europe; fourth, we investigate the consequences of politicisation for the European integration process; and, finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for integration theory.

In sum, we argue that the politicisation hypothesis as advanced in the scholarly literature needs substantial revision. There is neither a single uniform process of politicisation nor is there a clear trend over time. Rather, European integration must be interpreted as a strategic opportunity for political actors, political parties in particular, to mobilise citizens. Such opportunities to politicise European issues became increasingly common with the intensification of the integration process after the mid 1980s, but they already existed in the 1970s and they have been exploited not only by radical challengers but also by mainstream parties on several occasions. The result is a punctuated politicisation, characterised by significant variation over time, across countries and political arenas. This pattern may be interpreted as a result of the dynamic interplay of strategies of politicisation and de-politicisation. Although these findings do not fully support postfunctionalist integration theory, they are compatible with most of its assumptions.

Introduction

The previous chapters have traced the politicisation of Europe by looking at contestation both around key integration steps and national elections. Generally speaking, the results support the claim that the European integration process has become politicised since the 1990s. At the same time, they suggest that public conflicts over Europe are still very much an elite affair. While the study of election campaigns focused exclusively on political parties, the integration debates turned out to be dominated by public authority actors. Less powerful actors, such as civil society or social movement organisations (SMOs), were hardly present in these public debates (see also Koopmans 2007, 2010; Helbling et al. 2012: 216–220 and Statham and Trenz 2013a: 85–93). While this finding casts doubt on the idea that social movements and other civil society actors are key to the politicisation of Europe, as suggested by Beck and Grande (2007) and Habermas (2012), we still lack a systematic assessment of this claim.

This chapter provides such an assessment by testing our ‘mass politics hypothesis’ (see Chapter 1). In other words, the chapter answers the question of whether European integration has become part and parcel of mass politics, i.e., whether non-party challengers and ordinary citizens are becoming more involved in conflicts over Europe. To do this, the chapter shifts attention to the protest arena. More specifically, we ask whether and to what extent European integration has become politicised in the protest arenas of the six countries. The protest arena's centre and pivotal point is the direct participation of people in protest events. Mobilising this active participation is a core competence and resource of the collective actors involved in protest politics (Hutter 2014a: 26–29). Taking up Schattschneider's (1975 [1960]: 1) words again, the protest arena is the channel where the ‘crowd’ can enter the fight without institutional, thematic or territorial boundaries. Thus, we change our research strategy and focus on protest events that are thematically related to European integration – either directly in terms of the issues articulated by the protesters or indirectly by means of the justification frames used or the addressee of the event (for the data collection strategy, see Chapter 2).

The focus on protest events reflects our general definition of politicisation as involving three dimensions: salience, polarisation and actor expansion.

Politicising Europe is the third major volume from a long-term research collaboration between Edgar Grande and Hanspeter Kriesi that started in the early 2000s. It builds on previous work on the political consequences of globalisation and the re-structuring of political conflict in western Europe and takes a closer look at the development of political conflict over European integration. This book is once more based on a large-scale empirical research project that covers six west European countries, several political arenas and more than four decades from the early 1970s to a peak of the euro crisis in 2012. Our shift in emphasis to European integration issues is both for analytical and political reasons. On the one hand, our previous projects have shown that conflicts over European integration have been constitutive for the emergence of a new ‘demarcation-integration’ cleavage in western Europe. Therefore, examining these conflicts in more detail promised important new insights into the political mechanisms that drive the transformation of political conflict. On the other hand, political developments since the mid 2000s have given the impression that the European integration process has been entering a profound political crisis. This became most evident in the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty in two national referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005 and the following fruitless debates on the future of the ‘European project’. After two decades of intensified integration, which commenced in the mid 1980s with the project to complete the single market and came to an end in the mid 2000s with the accession of twelve new member states, there have been increasing signs that the political foundations of the integration process have been changing fundamentally. The current ‘euro crisis’ has intensified this political predicament even further. In 2015, it seems as if integration euphoria has given way to perennial frustrations, public support has turned into open political resistance and intensified political conflicts have been shaping decision-making on European issues both in supranational institutions and within the European Union's (EU) member states. Against this background, our study assumes that a focus on the politicisation of Europe, both as an analytical concept and as a political strategy, is key to an understanding of the acute problems that the European integration project faces today.

Introduction

As stated in the Introduction, this study is mostly based on new original data which has been collected by a collaborative team of researchers for the purposes of this book. It represents the most comprehensive and ambitious effort thus far to analyse the politicisation of Europe in all its relevant manifestations over a long period of time in a large number of European countries. More precisely, the volume focuses on six western European countries – Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland – in the period from the early 1970s to 2012, including very critical phases of the euro crisis.

Analysing the politicisation of European integration in such a comprehensive way entails confronting several conceptual and methodological challenges. The first challenge is the proper conceptualisation and demarcation of European integration, i.e., getting hold of Europe. The second challenge is designing an adequate research strategy which allows political conflict on European issues to be observed. The third is choosing the most appropriate methods to collect data on the politicisation of Europe. The final challenge of our study is determining meaningful levels of analysis and categorisations of issues when analysing the data on the politicisation of Europe.

In the following, we explain how we cope with each of these challenges. We describe in detail the critical choices we had to make in the design of our study, and in our strategy for collecting and analysing data. In the first section, we present our conceptualisation of European integration, its dimensions, its historical development and its country-specific manifestations. Against this background, we explain the periods covered by our study in more detail and the selection of countries. In the second section we introduce the three ‘windows’ that we use to observe the politicisation of Europe: (i) public debates on major integration steps, (ii) national election campaigns, and (iii) Europeanised protest events. In the third section, we introduce our data sources, sampling strategies, and coding procedures. We close by describing two central features of our data analysis, namely, the various levels of analysis we use and the categorisation of key variables. A more detailed account of how we measure politicisation can be found in the Methodological Appendix at the end of the volume.

Politicising Europe – why bother?

Politicisation has become a key concept in European integration studies. Since the mid 2000s, it has been the object of an intense and controversial scholarly debate. The rise of politicisation as a topic in research on Europe certainly reflects current problems and challenges of the European integration process. The failure of the Constitutional Treaty, increasing Euroscepticism among citizens, the successes of Eurosceptic political parties in national and European elections, the negative outcomes of national referenda on major treaty reforms, public controversies on political strategies to cope with the euro crisis – all these incidents suggest that the elitist approach which characterised European integration for decades has arrived at a critical stage. Politicisation, both as an analytical concept and as a political strategy, seems to be the key to an understanding of the acute problems of the European integration project.

Assessments of the ‘politicisation’ phenomenon in the scholarly literature differ widely, however. Although there seems to be agreement ‘that something like politicisation has happened since the mid-1980s’ (Schmitter 2009: 211–212), its level and intensity are still the object of controversies. Three questions are at the heart of the debate. First, there is disagreement over the empirical scope of politicisation. Can we really observe a significant increase in politicisation and what are its characteristic features? Second, it is unclear whether the changes observed are of a lasting nature. Is there a durable structuring of political conflict or do observers exaggerate singular events such as the debate on the Constitutional Treaty or public protest related to the euro crisis in some southern European countries? Third, there are conflicting opinions on the consequences of politicisation for the future of European integration. Will politicisation strengthen or weaken the European project? Is it part of the problem or the key to its solution?

To start with, Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks (2009), who put the politicisation concept at the centre of a new ‘postfunctionalist theory of European integration’, argue most forcefully that there has been a significant politicisation of the integration process in the post-Maastricht period, which has become visible not only in changing public opinion but also in electoral and protest politics. In their view, the European integration project has become the object of controversial ‘mass politics’.