Selective EU Framing on Twitter: Party Leaders Across Six Member States, 2007–2022

This article examines how political party leaders frame the European Union on Twitter and what this reveals about elite strategies of EU politicisation. Building on scholarship that calls for integrating meaning-making into politicisation research, it asks which frames dominate elite EU communication and which party-level and contextual factors predict the presence of EU framing. We analyse tweets from party leaders in Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia between 2007 and 2022, combining manual content analysis with time-series cross-sectional regression. Five EU-related master frames are identified: economic, cultural/identity, sovereignty, democracy-legitimacy and security. EU framing in leaders’ EU-related tweets is rare: almost 85 per cent contain none of these frames, and when framing is present, it is dominated by economic and security perspectives. The likelihood of framing is structured by ideology. Right-leaning, TAN-oriented, and especially radical-right parties act as the most consistent framing entrepreneurs, while centrist actors also engage under specific conditions; government status and party size matter little. Contextual effects are conditional, with Brexit as the only crisis robustly associated with heightened framing. We also find no strong evidence of a distinctive Central and Eastern European sovereigntist pattern. These results position framing as a complementary dimension of politicisation strategies and underline the selectivity of elite EU meaning-making on social media.

Czech Journal of Political Science, 25–64