Mémoire
| Résumé : | In the EU politicisation literature, scholars argue that the politicisation process is divided into three dimensions, namely salience, actor expansion and polarisation, and that these three elements need to be observed for politicisation to occur. Based on the Habermasian concept of deliberative public sphere, the master’s thesis claims that this scholarly conceptualisation overlooks that actor expansion and polarisation exclude each other in their nature. These two dimensions are opposite directions that politicisation can take. To measure this hypothesis, the online press coverage of two major French newspapers during European Parliament election campaigns of 2014 and 2019 has been analysed. The empirical findings show that the evolution of three dimensions records diverging trends. First, salience, even though increasing, remains quite low, which illustrates that the EU is an issue that is increasingly debated but yet not very visible. This degree of EU salience, considered as a prerequisite for politicisation, therefore accounts for a relatively low level of politicisation. Second, the actor expansion dimension is demonstrated to be very weakly developed and even decreasing; the analysis shows that media discourse is almost exclusively carried by elite actors. Third, in contrast, a high and increasing level of polarisation dimension is recorded. This thesis concludes that based on the deliberative perspective of Habermas, this high level of polarisation develops at the expense of a pluralist and expended public debate. These results therefore confirm that each last two dimensions should not be studied as a sine qua non condition for politicisation to be observed. |
