National political parties leaders facing the « eurozone crisis »: the (de)politicization of European integration, a legitimacy issue?
Promoteurs : Damien Bol (King’s College), Virginie Van Ingelgom
Chercheur : Alban Versailles
Financement : Bourse FRESH – FNRS
Building on a comparative and mixed-methods design, this project aims for a better understanding of the differentiated politicization of European integration. Combining the analysis of a contextual factor, the Eurozone crisis, to the analysis of national political leaders’ roles, the first goal is to develop reflections about the national elites’ discourses as an intermediate factor of (de)politicization of European integration. The second goal is to understand the possible consequences of the (de)politicization of European integration by assessing the impact of such processes on citizens’ attitudes and legitimacy they give to the different actors and levels of decision involved the management of the economic and monetary crisis. In doing so, this project focuses on the two important « shadow zones » of European integration (de)politicization process: the importance of intermediate factors and the consequences of (de)politicization. To do so, five national cases have been selected: Germany, France, United Kingdom, Belgium and Ireland. First of all, in order to understand the sources of (de)politicization of European integration, the analysis will focus on national political elites’ role (party presidents and/or major figure in the national government), mobilizing on the one hand qualitative methods (discourse analysis) and on the other hand quantitative methods, using data bases on their attitudes and programs (CHES, CCS, CMP). Then, in order to understand the effects of this (de)politicization, citizens’ attitudes will be analysed mobilizing quantitative method based on data from public opinion or voters surveys conducted in these countries (Eurobarometer, EES) and qualitative method (experimentation). In the end, the results from those two steps of researches will enable a richer analysis of the (de)politicization process of European integration.