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How do foreign political events shape voters' evaluation of policies whose outcomes are hard to observe? We argue that policy-specific political processes abroad provide information about the policy's feasibility and desirability that allows voters to update their preferences. We analyze how key events in British Brexit politics affected attitudes towards the European Union in other European countries. The results of 'unexpected events during survey' designs, a natural experiment, and a panel analysis show that events highlighting the difficulties of the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union led to a higher support of European integration in remaining member states, whereas an event highlighting the opportunities of Brexit resulted in more Eurosceptic attitudes. The article demonstrates that foreign events can influence voters' policy attitudes in other countries, highlighting the systemic consequences of events like Brexit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political communication researchers studying the news media coverage often distinguish between broadsheets and tabloids when sampling relevant news outlets. But recent work has pointed towards a 'tabloidization' of news coverage, complicating the empirical distinction between the two. Computational methods for text analysis can help us better understand how distinct the news coverage between these two types of news outlets is. We take the Brexit referendum as a case study illustrating various aspects in which broadsheets and tabloids cover an issue permeated by othering and divisive rhetoric. We focus on Brexit-related news coverage before and after the referendum (N = 32,946) and use word embeddings to analyze the portrayal of different groups of citizens that can generate an in- and outgroup divide. First, we document the presence of media-based othering in the form of overly similar migrant and European Union citizen representations that are, in turn, very dissimilar to the UK citizen representation. Second, we show partial convergence between tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, as differences in the degree and characteristics of media coverage are rather small and specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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A surprising development in the post-referendum Brexit process has been that vote intentions have remained largely stable, despite the cumbersome withdrawal negotiations. We examine this puzzle by analyzing the role of voters' expectations about the European Union's willingness to accommodate the UK after the pro-Brexit vote. Using data from the British Election Study, we explore how these expectations are updated over time, and how they are related to vote intentions. We find that voters who were more optimistic about the European Union's response were more likely to vote Leave. Over the course of the negotiations, Leavers have become more disillusioned. These adjustments, however, have not translated into shifts in vote intentions. Overall, we find evidence that motivated reasoning is an important driver of public opinion on Brexit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While previous research has taken into account different normative theories when examining the concept of the public sphere at the national level, the underlying normative conceptualisation of the European public sphere has often remained vague. However, better understanding whether the European public sphere is functional and able to fulfil its democratic role needs further specification of the underlying normative criteria. This study considers different normative public sphere theories in the context of the European Union (EU) news coverage. Specifically, it focuses on one main criterion, namely the actor structure, and examines which normative theory is able to describe the actor structure of the EU best. The visibility of national and European governmental actors, civil society actors and citizens is examined by drawing on secondary data of a large-scale content analysis of television and newspaper articles of all 27 EU member states gathered during the 2009 European Parliament election campaign (N = 12,850). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On 23 June 2016, a majority of 52% of British voters decided in a referendum that the United Kingdom should leave the European Union. The decision sent shockwaves around Britain, Europe, and the world: the ‘Brexit’-vote presents the first instance that a country has voted to exit a major supranational institution, putting both the European integration project and the future of the United Kingdom in a globalized world into question. At the time of writing, four months after the referendum vote, the contours of Brexit remain unclear. Yet even within this short time frame, Brexit politics have been remarkable on both the domestic and the international level. In this paper, we first present a brief overview of IPE research in the open economy politics (OEP) tradition. We then discuss the insights OEP provides that help us to better understand the referendum vote and Brexit politics, but also emphasize that they present a number of puzzles for OEP-inspired researchers. Based on this analysis, the final section suggests avenues for advancing the OEP research program. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Due to the increased importance of transnational governance, individual states become increasingly interdependent. This is also reflected in the news media coverage and media attention to foreign affairs. The European Union (EU) represents a case of advanced globalization. This study investigates news media attention to fellow EU member states. The main objective of this study is toexplainwhat factors determine whether EU member states report abouteach other. The analysis is based on large-scale content analysis data of TV news and newspaper articles of 27 EU member states gathered during the 2009 European Parliament election campaign (N = 19,106) and employs network analysis to explain differences in media attention. The findings show that there are indicators at the national level that are independent of EU governance, as well as factors related to the European integration that determine whether two states report about each other. As such, countries that are neighbors, and where the same language is spoken, are more likely to report about each other. Furthermore, smaller, older, and EU member states that are more supportive of the European integration report more on fellow states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]