This time it’s different? Effects of the Eurovision Debate on young citizens’ and its consequence for EU democracy – evidence from a quasi-experiment in 24 countries
For the very first time in EU history, the 2014 EP elections provided citizens with the
opportunity to influence the nomination of the Commission President by casting a vote for the main Europarties’ ‘lead candidates’. By subjecting the position of the Commission President to an open political contest, many experts have formulated the expectation that heightened political competition would strengthen the weak electoral connection between EU citizens and EU legislators, which some consider a root cause for the EU’s lack of public support. In particular, this contest was on display in the so-called ‘Eurovision Debate’, a televised debate
between the main contenders for the Commission President broadcasted live across Europe. Drawing on a quasi-experimental study conducted in 24 EU countries, we find that debate exposure led to increased cognitive and political involvement and EU support among young citizens. Unfortunately, the debate has only reached a very small audience.
History
School
Social Sciences
Department
Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Journal of European Public Policy
Citation
MAIER, J. ...et al., 2018. This time it’s different? Effects of the Eurovision Debate on young citizens’ and its consequence for EU democracy – evidence from a quasi-experiment in 24 countries. Journal of European Public Policy, 25(4), pp. 606-629.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Acceptance date
2016-11-04
Publication date
2017-01-20
Notes
This paper was co-authored by Jurgen Maier, Thorsten Faas, Berthold Rittberger, Jessica Fortin-Rittberger, Kalliope Agapiou Josifides, Susan Banducci, Paolo Bellucci, Magnus Blomgren, Inta Brikse, Karol Chwedczuk-Szulc, Marina Costa Lobo, Mikolaj Czesnik, Anastasia Deligiaouri, Tomaz Dezelan, Wouter deNooy, Aldo Di Virgilio, Florin Fesnic, Danica Fink-Hafner, Marijana Grbesa, Carmen Greab, Andrija Henjak, David Nicolas Hopmann, David Johann, Gabor Jelenfi, Jurate Kavaliauskaite, Zoltan Kmetty, Sylvia Kritzinger, Pedro C. Magalhaes, Vincent Meyer, Katia Mihailova, Mihail Mirchev, Ville Pitkanen, Aine Ramonaite, Theresa Reidy, Marek Rybar, Carmen Sammut, Jose Santana-Pereira, Guna Spurava, Lia-Paschalia Spyridou, Adriana Stefanel, Vaclav Stetka, Aleksander Surdej, Róbert Tardos, Dimitris Trimithiotis, Christiano Vezzoni, Aneta Vilagi & Gergo Zavecz. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of European Public Policy on 20 January 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13501763.2016.1268643.