This paper will present the results of an ongoing research building on a comparative design and innovative method. It aims for a better understanding of the differentiated politicization of European integration. Most previous studies in this area study the explanations of politicisation, intending to answer the question: “Why may (de)politicisation of European integration happen?”. We propose to go a step further in the process and ask the following question: “How may (de)politicisation of European integration happen?” Our analysis will focus on national political parties as intermediate factors of (de)politicisation. We are interested in the active role that political actors may play in the dynamic process of (de)politicization. Particularly, the public communication of national parties may have become, to a certain extent, Europeanized in the last years and decades. Parties may talk about the EU during national or European elections campaigns or in their daily public communication. Such discourses on European integration may follow a (de)politicization strategy. Indeed, some parties may prefer the EU issue to be highly salient and politicized in the national debate, while others may prefer the opposite. We will conduct discourse analysis thanks to a quantitative text analysis approach of parties’ discourses in four European countries: Belgium, France, Ireland and UK. We have collected a corpus of party manifestos and daily press releases; such data enables a deeper and richer analysis of the Europeanization of political communication. Our main result is the elaboration of a typology of politicising and depoliticising Europeanized political discourses.
