Impact of Media on the Evaluation of the Democratic Performance of the EU

The functioning of democracy at the European Union level is hotly debated. Previous studies showed that national institutional quality functions as a yardstick for democratic performance evaluation on EU-level. In this paper, we analyze the effect of the election campaign for the European Parliament, using a two-wave panel in 21 European countries (N=32411). Our main focus is the effect of the media coverage of the election campaign. We examine the flow of partisan information from news media to the voters and assess the media’s role in electoral politics and citizen learning. Our specific interest is whether the content of news articles affects citizens’ evaluations of political institutions, in particular the European institutions at election time. We find an effect of direct evaluative content from the media on citizens, depending on their voting behavior and whether they discuss about EU politics with friends and family or not. Furthermore, we also find a correlation with previous evaluations of EU democratic performance. Finally, as this research also has a comparative component, we analyze whether the same effects can be found in the different EU member states.