Campaigning on Europe? Party Communication Across Platforms. The Relationship Between Manifestos and Media Data in European Election Campaigns

In European election campaigns, parties not only face the trade-off between choosing European or national issues, they also have to decide on which European issues to campaign. As Braun et al. (2016) have shown, it is necessary to differentiate between European constitutive and policy issues. Although recent research literature often expected, that parties focus more on European issues in manifestos than in the media, there is no systematic comparison of issue campaigning in direct party communication and media coverage in European elections. If we follow the expectations, it raises the question to what extent parties are able to make their programmatic points visible in the election campaign? Using data from the Euromanifesto Project and new media data from the DFG-project “European elections and political structuring” for the period 1999-2014 this paper shows that the “European integration issues” play in both platforms an important role but are more salient in manifestos than in media debates. It shows furthermore under what conditions the two types of issues become more salient. The findings provide more insights for the understanding of European issue competition and the strategies of party communication on different platforms in election campaigns.