When Nobody Is Around You: The UKIP’s Contents Creation Via the European Venue

• In Event: Poster Session: European Politics and Society & Presidents and Executive Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: European Politics and Society

Abstract

Are the Eurosceptic parties beneficiaries or victims of media? In this study, I argue that the successful Eurosceptic parties are none of them. Rather, they actively utilize available resources to prolong the public attention on them and ultimately persist as a destabilizer of national and European political system, even when the media turns its back on. The case study of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in between 1999 European elections and 2009 European elections demonstrates that the party actively responded to the “attention vacuum” in between European elections by utilizing resources that were obtained via the European Parliament. The UKIP’s strategical activities include creating the web contents by using the audio-visual resources and publicizing its good performances in the European elections during the general election campaigns. To empirically show the UKIP’s active creation of promotion contents in between the years of European elections, I employ the two types of qualitative research methods: elite interview with the UKIP Members of the EP and content analysis of the party’s website, YouTube page, and election materials.
Both political communication studies and European political party scholarship tend to consider Eurosceptic parties as the mere beneficiaries or victims of changing media attention on the parties. This study fills the gap in literature by highlighting the active role of Eurosceptic political party in self-supplying public attention when the alternative political arena and the alternative media platform were given.

Author

• Injeong Hwang, Sogang University