The Mediatisation of European foreign policy – a cross-time, cross-national comparison

Introduction

According to Media Studies research, the mediatisation of society has occurred at an accelerating pace since the early 1990s. The theory of mediatisation argues that one result of this development is that politics increasingly operates according to a media logic. The purpose of the research project The Mediatisation of European foreign policy – a cross-time, cross-national comparison is to investigate the degree to which, and in what way, the premise that politics has adopted a media logic, as opposed to political logic, is supported by comparative, empirical analysis of European states’ foreign policies. We study whether degree of media logic in foreign policy covaries with degree of consensus and conflict in foreign policy, and whether media logic in foreign policy is manifest in different ways in different political cultures – both as regards form and content. The project will answer the following research questions: *To what degree does the impact of media logic vary with different positions on the conflict-consensus dimension? *In what ways, if any, does media logic impact on the form of European states’ foreign policies? *In what ways, if any, does media logic impact on the content of European states’ foreign policies? The research project is a cross-national comparison. The first step is a quantitative study of all 27 members of the EU to determine the extent to which media logic has impacted on foreign policy rhetoric. This first step provides us with an overview of the extent to which media logic has impacted on policy. In order to determine how mediatisation operates and answer questions about how it is manifest in form and content we study the mediatisation process more closely using process tracing. We focus on three states with different political cultures: United Kingdom, Finland and Sweden. The in-depth part of the study is conducted in four arenas: the media arena, the parliamentary arena, the government arena and the diplomatic arena. Both the analysis of all 27 EU states and the three-state, in-depth study will include a comparison of developments over the past 20 years.

Publications from this project

Brommesson, Douglas & Ekengren, Ann-Marie "What happens when a new government enters office? A comparison of ideological change in British and Swedish foreign policy 1991-2011", accepted for publication in Cooperation and Conflict.

Brommesson, Douglas & Ekengren, Ann-Marie "Mediatisation of European foreign policy - a cross-time, cross-national comparison", Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift vol 114(1): 59-67.