Framing and Salience of Issues in the 2009 European Elections

Abstract

Were common issues across the EU during the campaign framed as mainly ‘national’ or mainly ‘European’ by the member states? This chapter overviews the main election topics: economic and monetary affairs (responses to the financial crisis), employment and social protection in Europe (social security systems, European social model), climate change/energy, foreign affairs, EU enlargement, immigration, terrorism and security, agriculture and fisheries and constitutional reform (including the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty). For each state, the authors of the country case studies in Part II of this book ranked for this section the salience of those issues, ranging from 0 (no relevance at all) to 3 (high salience), and indicated the dominant perspective: mainly national (a score of 1) or mainly European (a score of 3), with a score of 2 representing the mid-point.¹ The scores reflect the authors’ judgement of the campaigns and are not derived from a content analysis of news stories or party manifestos. Mixed framing (national and European) characterised many issues in most EU states.