Pluralism or Democratic Erosion in the European Union? (Trans-)National Debates

• In Event: European Union Politics

Abstract

In recent years, government policies in Hungary as well as Poland have drawn increasing concerns about democratic backsliding within the European Union. Yet until now, other European Union (EU) member states have not reacted strongly: despite invocation of article 7 against both countries (for breaching the European Union’s founding values), consequences for either country have been minimal. Why do we observe democratic erosion within individual countries without much, if any, destabilization within the EU as a whole? Is this pluralism at work, or is the European Union stuck, as Daniel Kelemen has argued, in an unfortunate authoritarian equilibrium?
The authoritarian equilibrium explanation highlights the importance of institutions. However, it is also possible that the lack of consequences for Hungary and Poland is due to broader national or transnational perceptions of politics in these countries. One possibility is that political actors and publics in other member states have been slow to change their general beliefs about these countries and their governments because media coverage of those countries has changed little. An alternative explanation might be that media coverage has changed, but remains couched in terms of pluralism: who are other European Union countries and publics to criticize their Europeans in Poland and Hungary for apparently supporting different, illiberal but perhaps not strictly undemocratic policies?
This paper tests these alternative explanations by analyzing the depiction of Poland and Hungary in leading newspapers in the five largest EU member states: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain. Across these member states, I compile a unique corpus of tens of thousands of articles mentioning the two countries, and leverage new developments in machine translation and machine learning to analyze and compare them.
Recent innovations in machine translation make it possible to systematically compare the discourse regarding a particular subject — in this case, a country — across different languages. This enables me not just to examine whether sentiment associated with a country (how positively or negatively it is described) has changed over time, and whether the topics most often discussed regarding that country have shifted along with recent developments, but also to compare and contrast such changes across countries directly.
Such direct comparisons allow me to test, for the first time, several hypotheses about the causes behind the lack of member state reaction to democratic backsliding, as the five countries whose media I study vary on most of these causes: geographical distance, historical ties, political affinity, commercial connections, etc. The findings have implications not just for our specific understanding of how member states handle political problems within the European Union (or fail to do so), but also, more broadly, of how key factors shape one state’s image of another state.

Author

• A. Maurits van der Veen, College of William & Mary