Alex Hartland, Daniela Braun, Giuseppe Carteny,
Rosa M. Navarrete and Ann-Kathrin Reinl
International crises and Euroscepticism have made European issues prominent in citizens’ lives. This article studies the role of three key European issues – migration, the environment, and EU integration – for political parties and citizens. The analysis centres on nine EU member states, combining party manifestos from the 2024 European Parliament elections with survey data. It finds a gap between the concerns of citizens and the political parties, an important consideration for election campaigns in general. Moreover, the analysis suggests that the salience in party manifestos has a modest direct influence and a stronger indirect impact on their appeal to citizens in most countries studied. Specifically, citizens concerned with migration and the environment evaluate parties based on the prominence they give to these issues during the campaign. The findings offer important avenues for further research on party issue emphasis and the measurement of issue salience via large language models (LLMs).
Daniela Braun and Michael Kaeding
European democracy is undergoing profound change. The various crises of the past 15 years and the transformations associated with modernisation, globalisation, geopolitics and Europeanisation are threatening the trust of citizens in political actors and institutions and the legitimacy of the EU multi-level system. This goes hand in hand with the polarisation of European societies. In order to counter these developments, the problems of trust and legitimacy must be better researched. This is where the ActEU research project “Towards a new era of representative democracy. Activating European Citizens’ Trust in Times of Crises and Polarisation” comes in. This article provides an overview of the underlying conceptual considerations of the Horizon Europe project.