Crisis Contained, Legitimacy Diminished? The Eurozone Crisis in EU-Related Media Debates,

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1 Crisis Contained, Legitimacy Diminished? The Eurozone Crisis in EU-Related Media Debates, Achim Hurrelmann (Carleton University) and Andrea Wagner (MacEwan University) Paper prepared for the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) Biennial Conference in Miami, Florida, May 4-6, 2016 Draft Comments welcome! Abstract: The Eurozone financial crisis is widely interpreted as the first component perhaps even the decisive trigger of the polycrisis currently engulfing the European Union (EU). This paper examines why the Eurozone s troubles could have such far-reaching negative effects on the EU s legitimacy. Using methods of political claims analysis, it studies news media debates about the crisis in four Eurozone states (Germany, Austria, Spain and Ireland) between 2009 and It puts a particular focus on the role of legitimacy-related arguments in media discourse, and examines how the EU s supranational and intergovernmental elites responded to the legitimation challenge inherent in the crisis. The analysis shows that the media debates analyzed here treated the Eurozone crisis primarily as a public policy problem, thus ignoring the legitimacy dimension of the crisis, and leaving the political challenge that it posed to the EU largely unaddressed. Keywords: Eurozone crisis, media discourse, legitimation, political claims analysis, binary logistic regression Author contact: Achim Hurrelmann Andrea Wagner Carleton University MacEwan University Department of Political Science Department of Political Science 1125 Colonel By Drive Avenue Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6, Canada Edmonton, Alberta T5J 4S2, Canada achim.hurrelmann@carleton.ca wagnera27@macewan.ca

2 1 I. Introduction 1 In September 2011, José Manuel Barroso, then President of the European Commission, called the Eurozone financial crisis the biggest challenge in the history of the European Union (EU). He spoke at the height of a crisis that rattled the EU s flagship project of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and overshadowed virtually all other EU activities. What particularly concerned Barroso was the fact that the crisis affected not only the economics of European integration, requiring crisis response at frantic pace and persistent institutional innovation, but also had a political component. This crisis is financial, economic and social, he told the European Parliament in his annual State of the Union Address. But it is also a crisis of confidence. A crisis of confidence in our leaders, in Europe itself, and in our capacity to find solutions (Barroso 2011). The statement by Barroso points to the fact that the Eurozone crisis was more than just a problem of EMU policy; rather it implied a challenge to the very legitimacy of the EU polity. This challenge has proved even more difficult to address than the economic problems that caused the crisis, which were eventually at least temporarily contained. By contrast, the Eurozone crisis continued to linger politically, setting in motion politicization and delegitimation processes that would later culminate, inter alia, in the strong showing of Eurosceptic parties in the European Parliament (EP) election of 2014 and in the Brexit referendum of Research for this project has been supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Sebastian Baglioni and Anna Gora contributed to developing the conceptual framework for this study and conducted significant parts of the media analysis. Research assistance was also provided by Ana da Silva Soares, Sven Schirmer and Nicole Warkotsch.

3 2 This paper examines how the Eurozone crisis and its inherent legitimation challenge were communicated in the news media in four Eurozone member states Germany, Austria, Spain, and Ireland between 2009 and The paper seeks to understand how the crisis turned out to be so damaging for the EU s legitimacy, and why the legitimation challenge that it posed was not more effectively countered by the EU s supranational and intergovernmental elites. We ask the following questions: Are media discourses about the crisis characterized by an increase in explicit legitimation debates about European integration? Is there a visible decline in the EU s legitimacy? Which arguments and justifications prove influential in this respect? How do politicians at the EU and member-state level respond to the crisis? Is there any evidence that they engage in explicit attempts to re-legitimate the EU in the face of the crisis? Our analysis proceeds in five steps. Section II reviews conceptual arguments for why the Eurozone crisis can plausibly be seen as a legitimation challenge for the EU. Section III discusses the methods used in our study of EU-related public discourse; it explains the selection of countries and time periods as well as the technical steps taken in analyzing political claims. Based on this discussion, Section IV develops hypotheses about the impact of the Eurozone crisis on EU-related media reporting. Sections V to VII test these hypotheses. Section V presents our findings on the importance of legitimation debates vis-à-vis more policy-oriented discourse; Section VI takes a closer look at the content of EU-related legitimation arguments; and Section VII focuses specifically on the contribution of EU and member-state politicians to the crisis discourse. Our analysis reveals a number of unexpected features of the media s crisis discourse. In the concluding section, we discuss how these can help us understand why the Eurozone crisis proved so damaging for the EU s legitimacy.

4 3 II. Conceptual framework: The Eurozone crisis as a legitimation challenge for the EU The Eurozone crisis consisted of three interconnected problems that developed in the Eurozone periphery beginning in early 2010: a banking crisis, a sovereign debt crisis, and a crisis of the real economy (Lane 2012; Caporaso and Rhodes 2016). All three crises developed in the wake of the global financial crisis and subsequent credit crunch that originated in the United States in 2008, but they had their roots in the institutional architecture of EMU, especially in the insufficient coordination between the European Central Bank s one-size-fits-all monetary policy and the Eurozone member states 17 (later 19) separate economic policies. These institutional deficiencies encouraged short-sighted economic policy choices on part of memberstate governments, which resulted in public and/or private over-borrowing and an economic crash. The EU and its member states responded to the crisis with a variety of anti-crisis measures, including emergency bailouts for Eurozone states in danger of sovereign default (tied to stringent austerity and structural adjustment conditions), multiple ECB interventions (including eventually the promise of doing everything it takes to prevent the default of a member state), and a set of institutional reforms designed to prevent the reoccurrence of similar crises in the future (Salines, Glöckler and Truchlewski 2012). Unsurprisingly, economic events of this magnitude had significant political ramifications. According to most accounts, they led to a spike in the politicization of European integration, which became visible, inter alia, in extensive media coverage devoted to the EU s crisis response (Kriesi and Grande 2015), controversial debates about anti-crisis policies in national parliaments (Closa and Maatsch 2014), contested elections at the national level in which many incumbent governments were punished for EU-level policy choices (Kriesi 2014), and a strong showing of populist, anti-elite parties in the 2014 European Parliament elections (Treib 2014).

5 4 All this was accompanied by a clear drop of public approval for the EU and a marked deterioration of the EU s image in the citizenry (Figure 1). [Figure 1] These developments suggest that the crisis-induced politicization of European integration did not merely entail greater salience of EU-related policies, but also posed broader issues for the EU s legitimacy. At least three factors are relevant in this respect: First, the crisis could be interpreted as an example of negative economic effects of European integration. While economic prosperity was long seen as a main reason and one of the most effective arguments for EU membership, the Eurozone s troubles could be blamed, at least in part, on the insufficient institutional architecture of EMU (Krugman 2013; Scharpf 2013). Attempts to deal with it proved costly as well, putting a clear price tag on the aim of unifying Europe (Kuhn and Stoeckel 2014, 624). Second, the crisis exposed certain undemocratic features of EU decision making. The EU s crisis governance was characterized by intergovernmental and technocratic policy modes, while democratically elected parliaments at the EU and member-state level were largely sidelined (Offe 2013; White 2015). The crisis also showed that EU (and especially EMU) membership imposes severe constraints on national democracies; as member states (particularly the recipients of bailouts) were put under heavy pressure to adopt solutions negotiated in Brussels, even when they clearly did not enjoy popular support at home (Scharpf 2011). Third, both the bailouts and the ECB intervention to contain the crisis raised significant questions of legality. After all, the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) contains explicit provisions preventing the EU from assuming commitments of

6 5 member state governments (Art. 125 TFEU) and ruling out direct ECB purchases of national debt instruments (Art. 123 TFEU). While technical solutions for the bailouts and ECB interventions were ultimately found that respected the letter of these legal provisions, by setting up bailout funds outside of EU institutions and focusing ECB interventions on secondary markets, many observers have argued that the spirit of these Treaty provisions was violated in the Euro rescue (Mayer 2012, ). These three points illustrate that the Eurozone crisis had the potential to resonate beyond the economic realm by developing into a legitimation challenge to EU and its institutions. What do we mean by this? We define legitimacy in an empirical sense as a state in which political rule is perceived as rightful and acceptable by those subjected to it. This perception is not an inherent characteristic of political rule; rather it is constructed in political discourse (Hurrelmann, Schneider and Steffek 2007; Hurrelmann 2017). A legitimation challenge exists, then, if a political problem gives rise to discourses in which the rightfulness of political rule is explicitly questioned. In extreme cases, such a situation can escalate into a full-blown legitimation crisis, which Christian Reus-Smit defines as a situation in which the level of social recognition that [an actor s or institution s] identity, interests, practices, norms, or procedures are rightful declines to the point where the actor or institution must either adapt (by reconstituting the social bases of its legitimacy, or by investing more heavily in material practices of coercion or bribery) or face disempowerment (Reus-Smit 2007, 158). Our research seeks to find out how the legitimation challenge posed by the Eurozone crisis was communicated in media discourse. As discussed above, legitimation is ultimately a discursive process. Did media discourses reflect the legitimation dimension of the Eurozone crisis? If so, how did important political actors react to this development in their public

7 6 statements? Our study is guided by a set of expectations, which we will later translate into formal hypotheses. We expect, first, that public discourse about the Eurozone crisis indeed shifted gradually from a policy-oriented discussion to a legitimation debate. Second, we expect that in the process, public discourse about the Eurozone crisis became more negative in its evaluation of the EU, especially in narratives in which the crisis was discussed not just as an economic event, but assessed from a democratic and legal vantage point. We expect that this shift in public discourse should be particularly pronounced in those member states that were most severely affected by the Eurozone crisis, namely the debtor states that were forced to accept Eurozone bailouts and the associated conditionality. Finally, we assume that political elites have an interest in counteracting the emergence of legitimation challenges, in the hope of preventing the escalation into a full-blown legitimation crisis. We therefore expect European politicians, especially those representing EU institutions, to engage in discourse that explicitly re-legitimates the EU. The next section will explain how our study attempted to verify or falsify these expectations. III. Methodology: Analysis of political claims in the news media Empirical legitimation analysis can focus on a number of different arenas of public discourse (Hurrelmann 2017). This study concentrates on one of these arenas, namely the news media. Media reporting is a political arena dominated by political and societal elites; discourses in the media should hence not be equated with discourses among ordinary citizens. The news media is interesting for the present analysis precisely because of this elite bias: The media juxtaposes discursive contributions by politicians (both from the EU and the member states) with statements by professional observers (journalists and other commentators) as well as by speakers from civil

8 7 society; it thus allows us to identify what is unique about the discursive interventions by different types of speakers. This study focused on media debates in four Eurozone member states: Germany, Austria, Spain, and Ireland. In the crisis, Germany and Austria emerged as two of the main creditor states which financed a large share of the bailouts and whose governments became important advocates for the associated austerity conditions. The two countries differ, however, in that explicitly Eurosceptic political parties are much more firmly entrenched in the Austrian than in the German political system. Spain and Ireland, on the other hand, were hit hard by the crisis and ultimately forced to accept bailout funds. Our case selection hence promises to reflect the creditor-debtor dynamics in the crisis discourse. For each country, our analysis focuses on media debates five days prior and five days after the regular June and December meetings of the European Council between 2009 and In all of these summits, coping with the financial and economic crisis was a major if not the major agenda item. 2 Our study does not encompass all European Council meetings that took place between 2009 and 2014, let alone all crisis-related media discourse. However, the selection of the regular June and December meetings allows us to establish a consistent sequence of time periods that makes it possible to assess change over time. As the timeline in Figure 2 indicates, the period between 2010 and 2013 can be characterized as the years in which the Eurozone crisis was most intense. The first and the last year in our study 2009 and 2014 provide insights into EU-related discourse in years in which the Eurozone crisis was not as dominant as in the intervening years. Incidentally, both of these years also featured an EP election. [Figure 2] 2 We also collected and analyzed data for two European Council Summits in 2008; however, these were excluded from the present analysis as they were primarily concerned with the Lisbon Treaty, rather than the Eurozone crisis.

9 8 The analysis is based on all EU-related articles irrespective of whether they were explicitly related to the Eurozone crisis or not that were published in these time periods in two quality newspapers per country: Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany, Der Standard and Die Presse in Austria, El País and El Mundo in Spain, as well as Irish Times and Irish Independent in Ireland. Quality newspapers were selected because they tend to feature a particularly broad representation of different positions in a political debate. To reduce the effects of potential political bias, the sample of newspapers represents one paper with a centre-left and one with a centre-right editorial line in each country. Methodologically, the present study uses a variation of political claims analysis, an approach first developed for the Europub project at the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (Koopmans and Statham 1999; Koopmans 2002). The basic unit of analysis in this approach is a political claim, defined as the public expression of an opinion related to institutions, processes or results of collective decision making. Claims represent explicit and purposive discursive action. 3 They can take the form of evaluations (support/criticism), demands or policy proposals, as well as expressions of approval or disapproval of other claims. Claims can originate from speakers cited in newspaper articles or from journalists/guest authors writing opinion pieces. This study 3 The study followed the Europub project in excluding statements that attribute opinions to political actors without explicit discursive evidence. Reports on public opinion research were not treated as purposive discursive action. Also excluded were statements that are merely stated facts, were speculative, or made predictions for the future. In contrast to the Europub project, this study did not treat political/legal decisions (the legislature passing a law, a court deciding a case, etc.) or physical actions (the deportation of a refugee, an act of arson against an asylum seekers residence, etc.) as claims unless they were accompanied by the explicit verbal expression of a political opinion.

10 9 was interested only in claims related to the EU or European integration. 4 These are claims in which the EU or another European integration actor is the claimant, the addressee, and/or the object of the claim. Claims about domestic objects were treated as relevant if they concerned member-state policies linked to European integration (such as the government s negotiation strategy for an EU summit, or the transposition/implementation of EU law), or if the claimant established an explicit link between these domestic objects and the EU/European integration (for instance, by arguing that a domestic policy violates EU law). Relevant claims were coded using the following main categories: 5 Claimant: The author/speaker of the claim. The codebook distinguished between different claimant categories, most importantly journalist/guest author, EU/European politician, member-state politician, and civil society speaker (with further subdivisions). Object: The aspect of the EU/European integration that is relevant to the claim. The toplevel categories distinguished here were the EU polity (EU membership/european integration as such), EU institutions, EU policies, as well as member-state policies related to European integration. 4 To identify relevant claims, we first ran a search in FAZ BiblioNet (for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) or Factiva (for all other papers) with the search terms >eu or echr or europ* or eurozone< on all media texts for the selected weeks. This led to a pre-selection of potentially relevant articles. Following this automatic search, claims were identified manually by reading relevant passages of the pre-selected articles. 5 Categories not relevant for the analysis in this paper are omitted. An inter-coder reliability test yielded satisfactory results. The average pairwise correspondence between coders was 93% for the selection of relevant articles, 83% for the identification of claims, and 83% for the coding decisions (average of all individual categories).

11 10 Evaluation: An explicit negative or positive assessment of one of our objects, or of a proposal for institutional or policy change. In the analysis that follows, we are primarily interested in claims that evaluate the EU s status quo (rather than proposal evaluations), as these have a clear legitimacy dimension. Demand: A call for (or against) specific political activities by the EU or its member states. This study distinguished in particular between claims advocating for political change and claims supporting the status quo. Each claim in our study needed to contain either an evaluation or a demand, but could also contain both. Justification: The kinds of reasons (if any) presented for evaluations and demands. The top-level categories in this respect distinguished between economic arguments, other pragmatic/outcome-oriented arguments (such as national interests or the fulfillment of policy specific objectives), moral/justice-oriented arguments (including democracy and legality), and ethical/identity-oriented claims (for this distinction, see Habermas 1993). IV. Hypotheses: Indicators of a legitimation challenge Based on these categories, we are now in a position to formulate the expectations listed above in the form of specific hypotheses. Three groups of hypotheses emerge. The first focuses on the predicted increase in political discourse that refers to the Eurozone crisis not only as a public policy problem, but rather as a legitimation challenge. If this is indeed the case, it should be visible in three indicators. Hypothesis 1a: As the crisis progresses, explicit evaluations of EU-related objects gain in importance compared to claims that present demands or evaluate policy proposals.

12 11 Hypothesis 1b: As the crisis progresses, claims focusing on the EU polity and its core institutions gain ground compared to claims focusing on policy-related objects. Hypothesis 1c: As the crisis progresses, claims referring to moral or ethical justification criteria such as democracy, legality, or collective identity become more important at the expense of purely economic or other pragmatic/outcome-oriented arguments. The second group of hypotheses concerns not just the presence, but the content of legitimation discourse. As discussed above, we expect a gradual decline in the EU s legitimacy, especially in assessments based on criteria of democracy and/or legality, and most pronounced in the debtor states which were most severely affected by the crisis. These expectations can be translated into the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 2a: As the crisis progresses, the share of positive evaluations of EU related objects declines, especially if moral or ethical justification criteria are applied. Hypothesis 2b: In the debtor countries (Spain and Ireland), the share of positive evaluations is particularly small, and their decline particularly pronounced. Our third group of hypotheses focuses on differences between various types of claimants in our study. We predicted that politicians perceive the legitimation challenge posed by the Eurozone crisis as a particularly serious threat, and that they respond with a political discourse that seeks to re-legitimate the EU. This results in the last two hypotheses: Hypothesis 3a: Among politicians (especially those representing EU institutions), the trend towards legitimation debates is more pronounced than among other kinds of speakers.

13 12 Hypothesis 3b: Among politicians (especially those representing EU institutions), the trend towards declining legitimacy is less pronounced than among other kinds of speakers, or even entirely absent. V. Findings (I): From a policy discussion to a legitimation discourse? In total, our analysis for the six years included in this study ( ) identified 6070 relevant claims (1956 from Germany, 1367 from Austria, 1929 from Spain, 819 from Ireland), drawn from 3808 individual newspaper articles. The numeric distribution of claims over time follows the same general pattern in all three states (Figure 3): The number of claims rises markedly with the onset of the Eurozone crisis, reaching a peak in 2011, but declines afterwards, returning to pre-crisis levels by 2013 or [Figure 3] Is the Eurozone crisis indeed characterized by a gradual increase in the share of evaluative claims, as the legitimation challenge inherent in the crisis becomes more apparent (Hypothesis 1a)? In order to test this hypothesis, we analyzed our coding data using a binary logistic regression model. Logistic regression is used to predict categorical outcomes from continuous and/or categorical predictors when the dependent variables has only two categories. In other words, we will predict which of the two categories a claim will belong to given the information supplied by our independent variables. The B coefficients in logistic regression, as reported in our tables, represent the change in the logit of the dependent variable associated with a one unit change in the predictor variable. The logit of the outcome is the natural logarithm of the odds of the dependent variable in this case, an evaluative claim occurring. The odds ratio, expressed as the exponential of the coefficient (Exp(B)), is an indicator of the change in odds

14 13 resulting from a unit change in the independent variable. 6 A value higher than one indicates that as the predictor increases, the odds of an evaluative claim occurring increases. Conversely, odds ratios lower than one point to decreasing odds that the outcome will occur. Table 1 presents the results of our analysis predicting the odds of evaluative claims. As explained above, we are interested here in claims that contain an explicit evaluation of one of our objects, as opposed to claims that make a demand (without any evaluation) or express a negative or positive opinion about a policy proposal. Table 1 shows that the odds of such claims correspond, in a statistically significant way, to a number of independent variables: [Table 1] Claimants: For this variable, we use journalists as our reference category. Compared to journalists, we find that EU politicians (odds ratio 0.373) and member state politicians (odds ratio 0.431) are comparatively less likely to make evaluative claims. A more detailed analysis of differences between various groups of claimants will be provided in Section VII below. Country: For this variable, our model distinguishes between creditor and debtor states, using the first as our reference category. We find that evaluative claims are comparatively less likely in debtor states (odds ratio 0.844). In other words, the countries most affected by the crisis are characterized by a more intensive policy discourse, rather than a particularly pronounced evaluative discourse. 6 The odds of an event occurring are defined as the probability of an event occurring divided by the probability of that event not occurring

15 14 Object: For this variable, our reference category are EU-related domestic policies. Compared to these, claims that discuss EU polity and institutions (odds ratio 0.799) and EU policies (odds ratio 0.376) are less likely to be evaluative. This finding reflects the peculiar dynamics of the Eurozone crisis, where the adequacy of member-state policies was often controversially debated. Justification: For this variable, our reference category are claims without an explicit justification. Compared to this group of claims, all claims with a specific justification are more likely to be evaluative, but the likelihood of an evaluative claim is lower for claims supported by economic arguments (odds ratio 1.591) than for claims that use other pragmatic justifications (odds ratio 2.158), or ones that use moral/ethical justifications (odds ratio 2.181). Paper and article type: The political orientation of the newspapers in our sample does not influence the odds of evaluative claims. Unsurprisingly, opinion articles turn out to be more likely to contain evaluative claims than news reports (odds ratio 1.306). Particularly interesting in the light of Hypothesis 1a are the odds ratios associated with the various years included in our study. This analysis shows that, compared to the reference year of 2009, the odds of evaluative claims increase slightly in the crisis years. The results for 2013 and especially 2014 are noteworthy: In spite of the fact that the crisis is slowly receding in these years, the odds of evaluative claims rise significantly. In 2014, the last year of our study, the change of odds of an evaluative claim are more than twice as high as in 2009 (odds ratio 2.207). This supports Hypothesis 1a and its suggestion of an increase in evaluative discourse over time. It is important to note, however, that evaluative discourse as such does not necessarily indicate a legitimation debate; it might simply reflect the perception that crisis-induced policy

16 15 experimentation at the EU level is slowing down after 2012; hence there is more space in public discourse for reflection on the success of EU policies, and less need for new demands and policy proposals. To classify the increase in the odds of evaluative claims as the emergence of a genuine legitimation debate about the EU, one would also expect to see a shift in the object of claims from the EU-level or domestic policy towards more fundamental aspects of the EU polity and its institutions (Hypothesis 1b). In order to test this hypothesis, we conducted a multinomial logistic regression analysis, the extension of binary logistic regression which constructs a model with an outcome variable that has more than two categories. This analysis does not confirm our hypothesis. As Table 2 shows, the odds of claims on the EU polity or EU institutions decrease after 2009, compared to our reference category of EU-related domestic policies. There is some indication of an increase in discourse on the EU polity or EU institutions in 2014, but these findings are not statistically significant. By contrast, we find a statistically significant increase in the odds of claims related to EU policy after These findings cast doubt on the hypothesis that the Eurozone crisis was increasingly debated as a legitimation challenge in the media arenas examined for this study. [Table 2] A third indicator of an emerging legitimation challenge, as defined above, would be a shift in the criteria of justification used to back up EU-related claims. In this respect, we would expect to see an increase in justifications framed in terms of moral or ethical criteria (democracy, legality, collective identity, etc.), as opposed to economic or other interest-based criteria (Hypothesis 1c). Again, we conducted a multinomial logistic regression analysis to test this hypothesis. This analysis focused only on claims in which an explicit justification was provided (N=5194), and examined the odds of claims referring to each justification category. Our

17 16 hypothesis is, once more, disconfirmed. As Table 3 reveals, there is no increase in the odds of claims backed up by moral or ethical justifications over the course of the crisis, compared to the reference category of pragmatic justifications. What we do see is that the odds of claims backed up by economic justifications increase as the crisis intensifies, and then recede after This finding suggests that the Eurozone crisis was treated as a policy challenge discussed in economic realm, but there is no evidence for a shift over time towards more fundamental moral or ethical justification criteria. [Table 3] In summary, our analysis provides only weak support for the prediction that the Eurozone crisis triggered, in the newspapers analyzed here, a development from a policy discussion towards a legitimation discourse. While there is indeed an increase in evaluative discourse, we find no corresponding shift from policy-related discussions towards a stronger engagement with the EU polity and its institutions, and the importance of moral or ethical justifications for EUrelated political claims does not increase either. These findings suggest that, after the peak of the crisis, claims related to policy-making activities give way to claims that focus on policy assessment, but not necessarily to explicit EU-related legitimation debates. VI. Findings (II): A trend of declining legitimacy? It is conceivable, of course, that the legitimation challenge inherent in the Eurozone crisis does not primarily express itself in a greater share of explicit legitimation discourse, but rather in an increasing negativity of EU-related legitimacy evaluations. This brings us to our second group of hypotheses. Do we indeed observe a trend toward fewer positive and more negative evaluations of EU-related objects? To answer this question, we turned again to a binary logistic regression

18 17 model, this time restricted only to claims in which one of our objects was either positively or negatively evaluated (N=3158). In other words, claims that were pure demands without an explicit evaluation, or evaluations of political proposals but not of the status quo, were excluded from this analysis. Table 4 presents the results of our analysis. It shows that the odds of a positive evaluation correspond, in a statistically significant way, to a number of independent variables: [Table 4] Claimant: Compared to journalists, EU and member state politicians are more likely to come to positive evaluations (odds ratio and respectively), while NGO speakers are less likely (odds ratio 0.808). We will examine the differences between various groups of claimants in Section VII below. Country: This model examines our four countries independently, treating Germany as the reference category. Compared to Germany, all other countries in our sample are less likely to positively evaluate EU-related objects. In line with our expectations, Spain emerges as the country where the odds of a positive evaluation are lowest (odds ratio 0.631), but Austria displays a discourse that is not much more positive (odds ratio 0.715). Our results for Ireland are not statistically significant. Object: Compared to the reference category of EU-related domestic affairs, we find an increase in odds of positive evaluations in claims about the EU polity and institutions (odds ratio 2.467). In other words, the EU as such is seen significantly more positively than EU-related policies, whether at the EU or at the member-state level. This suggests that, in our material, the legitimacy of the EU as an institution remains to some extent shielded from attacks on the quality of its policies.

19 18 Justification: Compared to claims with no explicit justification, claims that make use of moral or ethical justifications are clearly less likely to come to positive evaluations (odds ratio 0.494). This finding confirms that perceived deficiencies with respect to democracy, legality or collective identity are indeed damaging to the EU s legitimation. However, as we have just seen, these deficiencies are primarily held against EU-related policies, not the EU as such. Like in the preceding section, developments over time are particularly important to test our hypotheses on the development of legitimation challenges in the context of the Eurozone crisis. Hypothesis 2a predicts a trend of declining legitimacy. However, our analysis does not show clear evidence of such a trend. Rather, the odds of a positive evaluation increase after 2009, with odds ratios of about 1.5 (compared to 2009) for most of the crisis years. Only in 2014 does legitimacy collapse; in this year, the odds of a positive evaluation are only compared to This implies that our analysis of media discourse picks up explicit legitimation problems only after the 2014 EP election. (The election was held in May 2014, while our first time period for 2014 was in late June.) This suggests that the decline of legitimacy evident in our text corpus for 2014 was largely a response to the strong showing of Eurosceptic parties in the EP election; rather than having been directly triggered by the Eurozone crisis. Hypothesis 2b focuses on the difference between the countries included in our analysis; it predicts a particularly strong decline of legitimacy in the debtor countries. As mentioned above, our analysis partially supports this hypothesis, as Spain is the country with the lowest odds of positive evaluations. At the same time, media discourse in Austria a creditor country where Eurosceptic political parties have long been influential does not differ greatly from Spain in this respect. An analysis of trajectories over time in each country (not presented here), while not

20 19 statistically significant, suggests broadly similar developments in all countries included in this study. In no country is there evidence for a major decline in positive evaluations prior to By contrast, a clearer picture of the differences between creditor and debtor countries emerges if we look not at evaluative discourse, but at policy demands, most importantly demands for change (Table 5). In this respect, our analysis shows that, compared to Germany, media discourse in Ireland (odds ratio 1.571) and especially Spain (odds ratio 3.453) is much more likely to voice such demands. The majority of demands for change concern either EU policy or EU-related policy in the member states, rather than the EU polity or its institutions. These findings further underscore the interpretation that the Eurozone crisis was debated, in the newspapers examined here, primarily as a policy problem rather than a legitimation challenge. [Table 5] VII. Findings (III): Are politicians driving the EU s re-legitimation? The last question that remains to be discussed concerns the communication strategies of EU and member-state politicians during the crisis. As was explained above, quality newspapers were selected as data source for this study precisely because they give extensive space to claims by political elites, which are confronted with commentary by journalists and civil society representatives. Political discourse in quality newspapers is clearly not representative of political debates in the citizenry (let alone public opinion). Rather, it is examined here because it provides insights into how politicians are trying to shape political debates. In this context, our third group of hypotheses suggests that politicians especially those representing the EU should be particularly likely to engage in re-legitimation in the context of the Eurozone crisis.

21 20 Are politicians indeed the main proponents of the EU s re-legitimation in the face of the crisis? To answer this question, we ran our binary logistic regression models predicting the odds of evaluative claims (Table 1) and the odds of positive evaluations (Table 4) for a subset of our material consisting specifically of claims by these two groups of speakers. When examining, in a first step, the odds of evaluative claims, it is important to remember our finding that EU and member-state politicians are less likely to make evaluative claims than journalists. This is not surprising; after all, it is part of a journalist s job description to pass judgement on political developments. However, Hypothesis 3a predicts that the increase in the odds of evaluative claims in the course of the Eurozone crisis should be particularly pronounced among politicians, as they are trying to use their public statements to counter de-legitimating developments. Separate binary logistic regression models (not reproduced here) which focus only on claims by EU politicians (N=1357) and member-state politicians (N=2012), but otherwise include the same independent variables as our model in Table 1, confirm this hypothesis only for member-state politicians. For EU politicians, the increase in the odds of evaluative statements in 2013 and 2014, compared to the base year of 2009, is very close to the values for the complete dataset (odds ratios and 1.900). By contrast, the odds of evaluative claims in statements by member-state politicians rise more steeply (odds ratios and 3.038). What can we say about the content of politicians evaluative claims? As we showed above, both EU and member-state politicians are more likely to positively evaluate EU-related objects than journalists. Beyond this finding, our prediction in Hypothesis 3b was that the suspected trend towards declining legitimacy which in fact did not set in until 2014 would be less pronounced, or even entirely absent, among these group of claimants, since they have an institutional interest in shoring up the EU s legitimacy. This hypothesis can be tested by running

22 21 our model on the odds of positive evaluations for the subset of evaluative claims made by EU politicians (N=535) and member-state politicians (N=859). The results of these analyses are displayed in Tables 6 and 7. They show, once more, only partial support for our hypothesis. Among EU politicians, we find statistically significant increases in the odds of positive evaluations for the years 2012 and 2013, compared to the base year of 2009 (odds ratio and 1.890). However, our findings for 2014 are no longer statistically significant. Among member-state politicians, we find no indication of the predicted development. The odds of a positive evaluation increase for the year 2010, but decrease thereafter. Only the results for 2014 are statistically significant, and these show substantially lower odds of a positive evaluation in 2014 than in 2009 (odds ratio 0.333). [Tables 6 and 7] We can conclude that while EU and member-state politicians are indeed more likely than other speakers to defend the legitimacy of the EU, only EU politicians step up their relegitimating activities during the crisis. But even for EU speakers, we find that the most intensive legitimation activity occurred at the height of the crisis, when short-term rescue packages and medium-term institutional reforms were to be defended. After 2012, however, their relegitimating activities become weaker, a development that might reflect the assumption that the crisis was largely resolved in an economic sense. VIII. Conclusion: Elite discourse out of touch with the citizens? As indicated in the statement by José Manuel Barroso cited at the beginning of this paper, there are strong reasons for interpreting the Eurozone crisis as a significant challenge to the legitimacy of the EU. Our research examined how this legitimation challenge was communicated in media

23 22 discourse in four Eurozone states between 2009 and We expected to find a shift from policy discussions to legitimation debates about European integration, a trend of declining legitimacy, and increasingly active re-legitimation efforts by EU and member-state politicians seeking to counter attacks on the EU s legitimacy. The findings of our political claims analysis diverge from these expectations in a number of important respects. First, we do indeed find an increase over time in evaluative claims about the EU, but no corresponding shift from discussions of public policy to debates about fundamental features of the EU polity and its institutions, nor a development from a primarily economic framing of debates towards a more explicit discussion of democracy, legality or identity concerns. Second, there is no evidence in our material of an increasing negativity of EUrelated media discourse until after the EP election of 2014, which saw a strong performance of Eurosceptic parties in various member states. Third, we find that only EU politicians and not their counterparts representing the member states responded to the onset of the crisis with increased attempts to positively evaluate the EU, and even the efforts of EU representatives became weaker when the economic effects of the crisis were deemed under control. All of this suggests that, in the media discourse examined here, the crisis was discussed largely as a problem of public policy, while its legitimacy dimension was given surprisingly little space. In the light of the resonance that the crisis has had in elections and public opinion, this makes the media discourse appear curiously out of step with perceptions of the crisis in wide parts of the citizenry. We can speculate that these tendencies in media discourse further fueled the legitimation challenge inherent in the Eurozone crisis, by increasing the perceived elitepublic gap on the issue of European integration. After all, what our findings indicate is a profound mismatch between popular perceptions of the crisis and how it was discussed in the

24 23 media. The Eurozone crisis raised important questions about the legitimacy of the EU, but politicians and other elite actors featured in the media provided no response that matched the urgency of many citizens concerns.

25 24 References Barroso, José Manuel (2011), European Renewal State of the Union Address 2011, European Commission, SPEECH/11/607, 28 Sept 2011, (April 11, 2017). Caporaso, James A. and Martin Rhodes (2016), The Political and Economic Dynamics of the Eurozone Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Closa, Carlos and Aleksandra Maatsch (2014), In a Spirit of Solidarity? Justifying the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) in National Parliamentary Debates, Journal of Common Market Studies 52:4, Grande, Edgar and Hanspeter Kriesi (2015), Die Eurokrise: Ein Quantensprung in der Politisierung des europäischen Integrationsprozesses?, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 56:3, Habermas, Jürgen (1993), Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (Cambridge: MIT Press). Hooghe, Liesbet and Gary Marks (2009), A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus, British Journal of Political Science 39:1, Hurrelmann, Achim (2017), Empirical Legitimation Analysis in International Relations: How to Learn from the Insights and Avoid the Mistakes of Research in EU Studies, Contemporary Politics 23:1, Hurrelmann, Achim, Steffen Schneider and Jens Steffek, eds. (2007), Legitimacy in an Age of Global Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

26 25 Koopmans, Ruud and Statham, Paul (1999), Political Claims Analysis: Integrating Protest Event and Political Discourse Approaches, Mobilization 4:1, Koopmans, Ruud (2002), Codebook for the Analysis of Political Mobilisation and Communication in European Public Spheres, (April 11, 2017). Kriesi, Hanspeter (2014), The Political Consequences of the Economic Crisis in Europe: Electoral Punishment and Political Protest, in Nancy Bermeo and Larry M. Bartels, eds., Mass Politics in Tough Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press), Krugman, Paul (2013), Revenge of the Optimum Currency Area, NBER Macroeconomics Annual 27, Kuhn, Therese and Florian Stoeckel (2014), When European Integration Becomes Costly: The Euro Crisis and Public Support for European Economic Governance, Journal of European Public Policy 21:4, Lane, Philip R. (2012), The European Sovereign Debt Crisis, Journal of Economic Perspectives 26:3, Mayer, Thomas (2012), Europe s Unfinished Currency: The Political Economics of the Euro (London: Anthem Press). Offe, Claus (2013), Europe Entrapped: Does the EU Have the Political Capacity to Overcome Its Current Crisis?, European Law Journal 19:5, Reus-Smit, Christian (2007), International Crises of Legitimacy, International Politics 44:2,

27 26 Salines, Marion, Gabriel Glöckler and Zbigniew Truchlewski (2012), Existential Crisis, Incremental Response: The Eurozone s Dual Institutional Evolution , Journal of European Public Policy 19:5, Scharpf, Fritz W. (2011), Monetary Union, Fiscal Crisis, and the Pre-emption of Democracy, Zeitschrift für Staats- und Europawissenschaften 9:2, Scharpf, Fritz W. (2013), Legitimacy Intermediation in the Multilevel European Polity and its Collapse in the Euro Crisis, in Klaus Armingeon, ed., Staatstätigkeiten, Parteien und Demokratie: Festschrift für Manfred G. Schmidt (Wiesbaden: Springer), Statham, Paul and Hans-Jörg Trenz (2015), Understanding the Mechanisms of EU Politicization: Lessons from the Eurozone Crisis, Comparative European Politics 13:3, Treib, Oliver (2014), The Voter Says No, but Nobody Listens: Causes and Consequences of the Eurosceptic Vote in the 2014 European Elections, Journal of European Public Policy 21:10, White, Jonathan (2015), Emergency Europe, Political Studies 63:2,

28 27 Figure 1: Change in the percentage of citizens for whom the EU has a positive image, (Source: Eurobarometer 68 and 84) Austria Belgium Bulgaria Cyprus Czech Rep. Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Hungary Ireland Italy Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Netherlands Poland Portugal Romania Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden UK Figure 2: Timeline of major events in the Eurozone crisis (X=Time period analyzed in this study) Second Irish referendum on Lisbon Treaty First bailout for Greece EFSF created 26 EU states agree on Fiscal Compact Bailout for Ireland Berlusconi replaced by Monti in Italy Hollande elected French president Banking Union agreed Mario Draghi gives whatever it takes speech ESM enters into force Spain exists bailout mechanism Portugal exists bailout mechanism X X X X X X X X X X X X EP election Lisbon Treaty comes into force Treaty change agreed to allow for ESM Bailout for Portugal Sixpack legislation Second bailout for Greece Greek PM Papandreou resigns Bailout for Spain Bailout for Cyprus EU awarded Nobel Peace Prize EP election Ireland exists bailout mechanism

29 28 Figure 3: Number of claims per year Germany Austria Spain Ireland

30 29 Table 1: Odds of evaluative claim B Wald Sig. Exp(B) YEAR % C.I. for Exp(B) Lower Upper CLAIMANT EU politician MS politician NGO/Int'l speaker Center-Left Paper Opinion piece OBJECT EU polity and institutions EU policy JUSTIFICATION Pragmatic Moral/Ethical Economic DEBTOR COUNTRY Constant R 2 = 0.17 (Nagelkerke) 0.13 (Cox & Snell). Model χ 2 = , p < 0.01