One conflict, two public spheres, three national debates: comparing the value conflict over judicial independence in Europe across print and social media

Abstract

ABSTRACTConflicts over the independence of judiciary as one of the European Union’s core democratic values is one indicator of democratic backsliding among its member states. Based on the Europeanization framework, we compare this conflict in German, Polish and Spanish print media and Twitter from 2019 to 2021. In the countries that are strongly affected by the value conflict, Poland and Spain, Europeanization is less evident. In contrast, the German discourse shows a high degree of Europeanization. We demonstrate that the print media is strongly elite-centric, while Twitter shows a higher actor visibility and inclusivity. However, we also identify important country differences.KEYWORDS: European UnionEuropeanizationindependence of judiciarylegacy medianetwork analysisrule of lawTwittervalue conflicts AcknowledgmentsWe would like to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as the editors of the special issue for their constructive feedback on our work. We also highly appreciate the helpful comments from colleagues at the ECPR General Conference 2022 where we presented a previous version of our manuscript. We are thankful to Julia Martyniewicz and Lara Fuge for outstanding research assistance.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Supplementary materialSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2023.2278539Notes1. Location filter by country ensures tweets from other countries containing the same keywords are not captured during data collection. However, the total number of tweets collected in Germany and Spain is strongly affected when using the location filter. While it was necessary in the Spanish context to avoid capturing tweets from other Spanish-speaking countries, in Germany the location filter yielded a very low number of tweets. This could be because Twitter users can choose not to divulge their location information. Thus, all German-language tweets were collected without the location filter and then tweets from other German-speaking nations such as Austria and Switzerland were removed during the data cleaning process. The Polish case was not as affected and a similar number of tweets were captured with or without the use of a location filter, and thus the location filter was used to ensure minimum noise in the data.2. For detailed network characteristics such as number of nodes/actors and links/edges between them, average degree centrality and modularity scores, and descriptive statistics on vertical and horizontal Europeanization on traditional and social media networks, see Appendix Tables A3-A8.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation in the project “Value Conflicts in a Differentiated Europe: The Impact of Digital Media on Value Polarisation in Europe (ValCon)” (2020-2024)Notes on contributorsStefan WallaschekStefan Wallaschek is a postdoctoral researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Europesan Studies (ICES), Europa-Universität Flensburg and has worked in the project “Value Conflicts in a Differentiated Europe: The Impact of Digital Media on Value Polarisation in Europe” (ValCon). His research focuses on (digital) political communication, European politics as well as solidarity research.Kavyanjali KaushikKavyanjali Kaushik is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Sciences, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Her research focuses on the transformative impact of social media on political identities and actions, particularly analyzing the link between digital interactions and expressions with national identity development and mobilization for radical-right politics. She is also a pre-doctoral researcher for the project “Value Conflicts in a Differentiated Europe: The Impact of Digital Media on Value Polarisation in Europe” (ValCon), which examines the role of digital transformations in media in increasing conflicts over democratic values in Europe.Monika EigmüllerMonika Eigmüller is professor of sociology at the Europa‐Universität Flensburg and director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Studies (ICES). In her research she deals with various fields of sociology of European integration. Main topics of interest are value conflicts and social inequality in the EU member states as well as EU social policy. Her latest book on Sozialraum Europa (Springer) has been published in 2021.