In Barisione, M. and Michailidou, A. (Eds.) (2017).

Social media and European

politics: Rethinking power and legitimacy in the digital era. London and Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan

A digital movement of opinion?

Contesting austerity through social media
Mauro Barisione and Andrea Ceron (University of Milan)

Abstract. Social media opinions, although expressed by generally more active

citizenry, are emerging as an increasingly legitimate and influential form of public
opinion. As social media allow to overcome the problem of hidden preferences and
can favor political mobilization, these online opinions can also be linked with
collective action. Accordingly, the present chapter examines the role of such digital
voices as potential manifestations of “digital movements of opinion”. First, we
employ a semi-automated content analysis technique to detect Eurosceptic attitudes
on austerity in three European countries (France, Britain, and Italy). Second, we test
the relationship between online skepticism and the propensity to broadcast on-line
forms of anti-EU protests, rallies and demonstrations. Our analysis highlights that
anti-austerity protest seems to boost the online debate on austerity.

Keywords: social media; semi-automated content analysis; public opinion;

Eurosceptisism; collective action

Introduction
This chapter investigates how the ideas and practices of public opinion and collective
action interact and evolve in a social media environment and a campaign context.
In the digital age, both public opinion and collective action should be re-
conceptualised and studied in the light of two overarching forms of dis-intermediation
from traditional gatekeepers, namely: (1) professional polling and media
organisations (public opinion dis-intermediation); and (2) parties and organised
interest groups (collective action dis-intermediation). In fact, social media and social
networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter allow citizens, on the one side, to
emancipate from polling organisations and – another important channel of expression
until recent years – from sending letters to newspapers to make their voice access the
public debate; on the other side, the same social media affordances have the capacity
to turn digital public engagement into actual collective action without the
intermediation of political parties, trade unions, and a variety of civil society
organisations. Hence, social media provide a digitally networked public space both
for processes of opinion formation/expression and for citizen mobilisation, not only
online but also funneled into actual forms of protest and action.
This chapter analyses Twitter users’ comments over austerity policies in three
European countries – UK, France, and Italy – during three months prior to the 2014
EP election. The European debt crisis (Eurozone crisis) that started at the end of 2009
induced several EU countries to implement austerity measures intended to reduce the

1
government budget deficits. These measures were aimed at enforcing fiscal discipline
mainly through spending cuts, which resulted in an objective contraction of the
welfare state (Schäfer and Streeck 2013). This brought about several forms of protest
mobilisation (Della Porta and Mattoni 2014), public contestation (de Wilde,
Michailidou and Trenz 2013), and electoral punishment (Kriesi 2012) across many
EU countries. Twitter being an important part of the ‘online news media sphere’ (de
Wilde, Michailidou and Trenz 2013; see also Bossetta et al. in this volume), we
assume that the spontaneous, unsolicited opinions expressed and posted over a given
political issue are a fully legitimate and politically influential form of public opinion.
Moreover, understanding the new forms of public engagement in the digital age
requires considering, but also moving beyond, the established theoretical framework
of social movements and collective action (Bennett and Segerberg 2012).
In this study, given also the contentious nature of the issue considered
(austerity policies), we explore the idea of a ‘digital movement of opinion’ – a
conceptual combination of public opinion and social movements as manifested in the
social media sphere – having emerged in the post-2009 anti-austerity cycle of protest
across Europe. We first argue that movements of opinion are a sort of quintessence of
the new integrated forms of public opinion and collective action resulting from the
networked nature of digital engagement, and attempt to define the features of this
contemporary form of political participation. Thereafter, we illustrate the empirical
setting of this study, which is given by the campaign for the 2014 EP election, and its
theoretical implications. We thus develop a set of hypotheses concerning the
interaction of civil society-led movements of opinion with the potentially
institutionalising, Europeanising, and polarising effects of the European election
campaign. Finally, we test a more specific hypothesis about the possible ‘funneling’
effect of online contestation into more tangible forms of collective action.

Toward a theory of digital movements of opinion

As suggested above, social-networking platforms and other digital media affordances,
having objectively enhanced and transformed the public space for opinion expression
and citizen mobilisation, are challenging established notions of public opinion and
collective action. Before using social media data to investigate interactions between
public opinion and collective action over a specific issue, we aim to provide a
theoretical framework in which our empirical findings may be located and interpreted.
In this section, we start by putting forward a set of operational propositions, which we
will then discuss and justify on theoretical grounds. These propositions, which include
an ideal-typical description of what we mean by a ‘digital movement of opinion’, will
guide the research design, inform the theoretical expectations, and elucidate some of
the results of this study.
Our main operational propositions are the following: (1) Twitter (or Facebook,
or other social media) users’ comments on ‘austerity’ (or any other topic) is to be
considered as a genuine indicator of public opinion on that issue; (2) when comments
are virtually unidirectional (e.g. almost all negative toward ‘austerity’), they may
stand – under given conditions – for a ‘digital movement of opinion’ in support of, or
of protest against, a policy associated with that issue; (3) digital movements of
opinion may be accompanied by offline collective action (marches, strikes, public
meetings, demonstrations, rallies, flash mobs, and other events) with effects of mutual
reinforcement; (4) the co-presence of significant offline forms of protest is not a pre-
requirement for the existence of a digital movement of opinion.

2
 The most typical objection to proposition (1) is that opinions spontaneously
expressed on social media are auto-selected and thereby hardly representative of the
‘general public’ (Price 1992); in other words, they cannot reflect the actual
distribution of attitudes toward an issue among the national population. However, the
very idea of public opinion resulting from an aggregation of individual responses to
polls/surveys based on statistically representative samples is far from unquestioned.
On the contrary, this construct does have a specific historical origin – the emergence
of opinion polls in the US in the 1930s – and progressively came to hegemonise social
meanings and political uses of public opinion all over the past century (Perrin and
McFarland 2011). We call this relatively late conceptualization of public opinion
aggregate opinion.
At least two alternative notions of public opinion had been prevalent before
the era of opinion polls: the collective (i.e. supra-individual) product of a public
discussion on a theme of general interest (Park 1904; Cooley 1918; Habermas 1962);
a minority, more intense collective voice mobilised by organised groups against or in
support of a social/political cause (Blumer 1948; Bourdieu 1973; Ginsberg 1986).
In the new digital environment, social media are strongly making the case for
a further transformation of the idea of public opinion toward a combination of public
discussion and collective voice. This is because the most popular social networking
sites, in spite of undeniable tendencies to homophily, polarisation, sarcasm, and
verbal violence – all phenomena antithetic to a Habermasian public sphere – actually
constitute a public space for opinion formation and expression, in particular for the
younger generations. At the same time, there are voices or stances that tend to acquire
disproportionate power in this space. Rather than contradictory, this fact is congruent
with the conceptualisation of public opinion prevalent before the opinion poll era.
Finally, ‘social media opinion’ – or public opinion emerging from social
media platforms – might even come to incorporate the same aggregative principle of
the survey-based conceptualisation, given that online opinions can be classified and
counted (for example, by using sentiment analysis: Ceron et al. 2014) so as to produce
percentage distributions of a public’s attitudes on that issue. Also, this public might
adhere to a far less restrictive definition than generally assumed, insofar as the profile
of social media users is increasingly overlapping with the general public and,
conversely, dramatically diminishing non-responses rates from randomly selected
citizens are making probabilistic samples less and less reliable as mirrors of the
general public.
As for our second proposition, digital movements of opinion consist of
spontaneous online mobilisations of the general/attentive public, which temporarily
turns into an active public, usually as a reaction to a contingent, emotionally laden
societal issue or policy measure. As such, the ideal-type of a movement of opinion
presents the following features: it is (2.1) politically un-divided (i.e. unidirectional –
all reactions tend to be negative or positive); (2.2) socially un-categorised (i.e. cross-
cutting – no specific social group is involved); (2.3) formally un-organised (or ad-hoc
organising – i.e. no previously organised group or established leadership has activated
the movement), and (2.4) temporally un-sustained (i.e. relatively short-lived – as a
single-issue, or even single-event movement, it covers the lifespan of that given issue
or event on the online media agenda).
Whilst digital social movements are one of the contemporary forms of
expression of public opinion, this list of idealtypic features should make clear the
difference between a ‘movement of opinion’ and a ‘social movement’. Indeed, the
latter implies ‘collective challenges [to elites, authorities, other groups or cultural

3
codes] by people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interactions with
elites, opponents and authorities’ (Tarrow 1994). Moreover, social movements
involve ‘program, identity, and standing claims’ (Tilly and Wood 2015: 13) and
‘depend heavily on political entrepreneurs for their scale, durability, and
effectiveness’ (ibid.: 14). Conversely, digital movements of opinion, like other forms
of ‘connective action’, rely on the ‘internet-driven norms of networking, flexibility,
spontaneity and ad hoc organising’ (Chadwick 2013: 210). If the traditional logic of
collective action is associated with large organisational efforts of resource
mobilisation, digital movements of opinion also differ from Bennett and Segerberg’s
(2012: 752) ‘digitally networked action’ (DNA), in which digital media are primarily
recognised as ‘organising agents’ for protest actions with decisive offline extensions,
such as the Occupy Wall Street protests, the Arab Spring, the Indignados in Spain,
and the global protests against climate change.
Conversely, our notion of digital movement of opinion is more closely
connected with the ideas and practices of Internet activism, online protesting,
electronic advocacy, e-petitioning, and digital campaigning (Hick and McNutt 2002;
Della Porta and Mosca 2005; Earl and Kimport 2011; Kreiss 2015; Wright 2015).
However, while these activities are usually seen as being mobilised by NGOs, local
communities, public interest groups, and political parties, we maintain the more
spontaneous and reactive nature of this relatively loose form of citizen engagement,
which is not confined to political or social activists, but may largely involve members
of the general public.
Finally, propositions three and four certainly acknowledge the tight
interconnectedness of online and offline forms of public engagement, but also make
the case for potentially influential digital movements of opinion with no significant
offline extension. In other words, online voice against – or in support of, like in the
case of e-petitions – a policy or event may certainly trigger or amplify other forms of
street protest, or, in turn, it may well originate from an offline event (like for instance
a violent demonstration). However, the important point here is that digital movements
of opinion may be a legitimate and politically influential form of public opinion with
no significant corollary in terms of tangible offline action. As a form of public
opinion combined with collective digital action, this phenomenon should not be
downplayed or discarded as mere ‘clicktivism’ (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012),
‘slacktivism’ (see Mercea in this volume) or ‘cheap and ineffective but showy forms’
of political engagement (Morozov 2011; Farrell 2012). Firstly, not only does digital
engagement entail active motivation to write a comment on a social media device, but
it also involves the logic of ‘sharing’ (and retweeting), which should be recognised as
a relatively costly action, at least in terms of the user’s public self-presentation.
Secondly, even though public opinion is traditionally classified as a more ‘latent’ (or
less manifest) form of political participation, its potential impact in the realm of
politics is nevertheless acknowledged to be important (Key 1961; Burstein 2003), at
least as much as that of social movements and collective action. In this regard, a
number of studies have started to address the effect of online public opinion on public
policy (e.g., Dekker and Bekkers 2015; Ceron and Negri 2016). Following these
premises, although we maintain that the online and offline dimensions are
fundamentally interconnected in the new hybrid media environment (Chadwick 2013)
and a digitally networked social reality (Castells 2009), we wish to stress the
increasing and relatively autonomous importance of the online dimension of political
participation – i.e. digital social movements and, more in general, digital public
opinion.

4
The research setting: Europeanised communications and the EU election campaign
Before outlining our theoretical expectations related to the specific case of online
contestation of austerity in Europe, we briefly set this study within the framework of
the relationships between the national context and a European public sphere. Of
course, the levels and forms of public opinion expression and mobilisation can be
strongly influenced by the institutional structures and public discourses of the national
political systems (Koopmans and Statham 2010).
On the one hand, the national societal context and institutional opportunity
structures (Kriesi et al. 2008) should make a difference on how a public opinion
process takes place across different EU countries; but on the other hand, one might
also expect a certain cross-national similarity in this regard, since the European
integration process has made the case for an emerging European public sphere based
on ‘Europeanised’ communication patterns and political discourses (Trenz 2004;
Eriksen 2005; Koopmans 2007; Triandafyllidou et al. 2009). Hence, the question
hereby is to what extent are public discourses constrained by national media-related,
cultural, and political attitudes (namely, toward the EU) or, conversely, tend to reflect
a Europeanising communication pattern.
In this study, we consider national variations in the importance of austerity as
an issue of the public discourse, the degree of public contestation of austerity, the
society vs. party-driven nature of this discourse, and the European vs. national frame
of the discourse.
Two further specifications contribute to defining the theoretical framework of
this study. First, the temporal context is given by the weeks/months prior to the 2014
EP election. Hence, an important implication is that our expectations are based upon
theories of election campaign effects on voters’ attitudes and behaviours, namely in
terms of politicisation, attitude reinforcement and partisan realignment (Lazarsfeld et
al. 1944; Gelman and King 1993; Zaller 1992). Second, the institutional context
consists of the elections for the European Parliament, which have famously been
defined as ‘second-order national elections’ due to their alleged tendency to activate
in the voters’ minds the same voting logic as national elections, but with lesser
perceived institutional importance (Reif and Schmitt 1980). This has been observed to
result in relatively greater electoral success for radical, protest, and populist parties
(Norris and Reif 1997), but also in greater online visibility for minor parties (Vaccari
2013).
On the one side, the specificity of the temporal context (i.e. election campaign
and pre-campaign) will drive our expectations regarding how the above-mentioned
national variations should evolve over the time span considered. On the other side, the
EP election-related institutional context provides a particularly suitable context for
detecting the presence and analysing the evolution of a European and protest-oriented
issue such as austerity.

Data, Methods and Hypotheses

Our aim is to gather all the tweets mentioning the word ‘austerity’ (whether as a
hashtag or not) in the UK, France, and Italy from 1 March 2014 (when the research
design was activated), to 25 May 2014 (Day of the EP election; total number of days:
86). In effect, the limitation imposed to the Twitter Application Programming
Interface (API) makes it hard to gather the whole population of data from this source
(Morstatter et al. 2013). Although some techniques allow to partially overcome these
limits (Sampson et al. 2015), to maximise the coverage, data have been bought from a

5
data Firehose company. As such, our dataset is based on all the tweets downloaded
from that source.
Therefore, the basic version of this dataset includes the text of each tweet,
together with three essential metadata: the tweet’s author, date, and country (which
has been assessed either based on the IP address of the author or on the ‘geolocation’
of her/his account, when such option was active). The total number of tweets is
54.061, distributed as follows across the three countries: UK=38.351, Italy =10.293,
France= 5.417. Far from reflecting the mere penetration of Twitter or the scope of
digital engagement in the three countries, this unequal distribution should rather be
considered as an indicator of the different centrality of ‘austerity’ (in English or in the
national languages) as an issue of the public debate on Twitter in the pre-EP election
period.1
When it comes to the evolution of this debate during the course of the election
campaign, Figure 1 shows that mentions of ‘austerity’ were virtually absent in tweets
from France and Italy over the first weeks of March, whereas this issue was already
on the public agenda of the British Twittersphere. It is however after Chancellor
George Osborne’s budget statement on 20 March that tweets mentioning austerity
reach a peak in the UK. An echo of the same debate seems to reverberate among
Italian Twitter users in the following days when austerity becomes a relatively
constant presence over the following months. A similar pattern, but starting with a
two-week delay, can also be observed in the French case. Overall, the debate on
austerity is quite constantly present in the three countries over the last two months
prior to the EP election.

Figure 1. Mentions of ‘Austerity’ on Twitter in the UK, France, and Italy (1 March-
25 May, 2014).

Having extracted this initial dataset from the Web, we have then categorised each
tweet using iSA (integrated Sentiment Analysis), a supervised aggregated technique
of sentiment analysis that combines computerised analysis and human supervision
(Ceron et al. 2015; 2016). First, coders have read and tagged (i.e. codified) a few
hundreds of posts in the training set, and then an algorithm has extended these results
to the whole population of comments to estimate the (aggregate) distribution of
opinions that felt in each category. Thanks to human supervision this technique

6
improves on automated methods as it manages to catch all the nuances of the
language, including ironic sentences; furthermore, by estimating opinions in the
aggregate, it produces very accurate results (Ceron et al. 2016).
Firstly, we applied this method to general attributions of positive vs. negative
sentiment toward austerity policies. Since one indicator for the presence of a
movement of opinion is given by a massive – almost monopolistic (e.g. circa 90
percent) – predominance of negative attitudes toward a given social or political
object, we dichotomised between cases of negative sentiments and a residual category
or positive/neutral statements. Of course, we expect the expression of negative
sentiment to be favoured, to some extent, by the fairly negative connotation of the
word ‘austerity’. However, this should not be an obstacle to detecting a digital
movement of opinion, which seeks – almost by definition – to frame its core issue in
the desired terms as a specific political communication technique.
As the first part of Table 1 shows, the French case presents the highest values
in terms of online contestation, with more than 86 percent of negative statements
towards austerity. In turn, negative values are approximately 80 percent in Italy and
74 percent in the UK. Overall, these values point to a clearly negative discourse about
austerity policies, especially in those countries – like France under François
Hollande’s early presidency and Italy at the very beginning of Matteo Renzi’s
government – in which no political force in office explicitly defended the need for
austerity measures, as David Cameron’s conservative government was, on the
contrary, obliged to do, having directly implemented them in the UK since 2010.
However, these values should be only considered as a rough benchmark for cross-
country comparison, because detection of digital movements of opinion requires a
cross-time dimension to be included in the analysis, as in the next section. In addition
to standard sentiment analysis, each tweet was coded according to two orthogonal
dimensions:

(1) Source of statement: partisan vs. society-level

- Is the opinion about austerity uttered by a party actor (at any level, from
elected representatives to grassroots party militants) or by a civil society
member (ordinary citizens, but also journalists, academics, associations,
communities, think thanks)?
This dichotomy sheds light on the party- vs. society-based nature of digital
mobilisation over austerity in each country and over time.

(2) Type of framing: National vs. European

- Is austerity mainly addressed as a national or a European-level issue? Is there
any reference to an EU-level party, institution, politician, event, or
country other than the tweet author’s country, or do contents only refer to
national politics and society?

This dichotomy provides an indicator of the level of Europeanisation of the debate

about austerity in each given country and over time. The actual distribution of all
tweets across these two categories is presented in Table 1. When we bracket the
temporal dimension, 26 percent of overall tweets mentioning austerity in the UK have
a partisan source, against more than 50 percent in France, with Italy presenting an
intermediate position in this respect. Given that the French Twittersphere does not
appear to be dominated by particularly influential party-related accounts more than
the other two countries (on the contrary, Nigel Farage and Beppe Grillo were the only

7
political actors ranking among the top 10 users in terms of centrality in the three
countries: see Maireder et al. 2014), explanations for this cross-country gap might
have to do both with broader national sociopolitical opportunity structures (reflecting
a civil society- vs. a state-led model of political participation) and different strategic
behaviours by partisan actors in that specific context. Similarly, the remarkably
greater national orientation of the debate over austerity in the UK than in France
could rest both on contingent reasons (i.e. meaning of the issue at that specific time)
and on broader sociocultural factors, such as national variations in geopolitical
proximity to the centre vs. to the periphery of the EU, with a resulting difference in
terms of openness vs. insularity of the national political debate. However,
interpretations of these descriptive data are clearly less important, to the purposes of
this chapter, than theoretical expectations regarding the evolution of the debate over
the election campaign.

Table 1. Distribution of tweets on ‘austerity’ by sentiment, source of statement, type

of framing, and country
UK ITALY FRANCE

Negative 73.80 80.50 86.40

Sentiment twd austerity
Non-negative 26.20 19.50 13.60

Total % 100.00 100.00 100.00

N 38351 10293 5417

Partisan 25.82 38.44 51.61

Source of statement
Society 74.18 61.56 48.39

Total % 100.00 100.00 100.00

N 38351 10293 5417

National 79.18 57.88 20.15

Type of Framing
European 20.82 42.12 79.85

Total % 100.00 100.00 100.00

N 38351 10293 5417

Figure 2 presents a more general framework for analysis resulting from the
combination of the two dimensions considered (see appendix for examples of tweets
coded as belonging to either category). Since these two dimensions are orthogonal
(i.e. independent from each other), each tweet can be classified as belonging to one of
the four cells, which tap different types of (anti-)austerity discourse in Europe.

8
Figure 2. A Framework for analysis of Twitter statements about ‘austerity’ based on
the combination of (1) Source of statement and (2) Type of framing

Given the time-series nature of our dataset, the specific research hypotheses of this
study relate only in part to the ideal-typical description of digital movements of
opinion presented in the theoretical section of this chapter. More broadly, our
hypotheses combine insights from the theoretical section (‘Toward a theory of digital
movements of opinion’) with elements from the country-related and campaign-based
contexts of this study (Section on ‘The research setting’), as well as from the
framework for analysis presented in Figure 2. What follows is the resulting set of
hypotheses:

(Hypothesis 1) Realignment hypothesis: Over the EP election campaign, we

expect the online discourse on ‘austerity’ to become increasingly opinion-
divisive, which we operationalise as a growing share of tweets with non-
negative sentiment toward austerity.

More frequent tweet statements supporting austerity, especially where endorsed by

parties in office, should result from a ‘realignment’ effect of the election campaign
along party lines, with the overall discourse about austerity becoming characterised
by a less monopolistically negative tone, as election day gets closer.

(Hypothesis 2) Politicisation hypothesis: Over the EP election campaign, we

expect the online discourse on ‘austerity’ to become increasingly party-driven,
which we operationalise as a growing share of tweets posted by partisan
actors.

Greater online mobilisation by party activists and representatives should result from a
‘politicising’ effect of the campaign, with the overall discourse about austerity
becoming more party-based as election day gets closer.

(Hypothesis 3) Europeanisation hypothesis: Over the EP election campaign,

we expect the online discourse on ‘austerity’ to become increasingly EU-

9
 Framed, which we operationalise as a growing share of tweets including
European (i.e. meta-national) references.

More frequent tweet statements with a European framing should result from a
‘Europeanising’ effect of a campaign conducted for the EP election, with the overall
discourse about austerity becoming more Europeanised as election day gets closer.

(Hypothesis 4) Funneling Hypothesis: Moreover, we expect the online

discourse on ‘austerity' to generate more protest mobilisations, which we
operationalise as a time-lagged increase in number of tweets mentioning
‘protest’, ‘demonstration’, or ‘revolt’ depending on the number of mentions of
‘austerity’ on Twitter in the previous days.

An increase in mentions of protest actions should result from a ‘funneling’ effect of

online contestation into tangible collective action in the subsequent days, with the
overall online discourse about austerity generating more discourse about offline
protest participation.
To test the ‘funneling’ hypothesis, we have employed a slightly different
research method. Firstly, the dataset has been enlarged to include all tweets
(N=253.404) mentioning the words ‘protest’, or ‘demonstration’, or ‘revolt’ – and
thus evoking offline collective action – in the same three countries/languages and
during the same period of time. We then performed a Vector AutoRegressive model
(VAR) and a Lead-Lag Estimation, two techniques of times series analysis that allow
to measure, among two variables, which one is leading the other. The logic is thereby
to use these online mentions as a proxy for measuring the varying salience of offline
protest events, given the absence of aggregate data reporting the number of these
events by country and date.
All our hypotheses aim to investigate the interactions between social media-
based public opinion and election campaigns, which are an inherently more
institutionalised realm for political communication and public opinion processes. Our
research design is specifically conceived to capture dynamics of digital forms of
opinion in conjunction with increasing salience of party politics within the context of
an EP election campaign. The results that we analyse will be substantively more
significant as the campaign reaches its final stage, not only because the number of
tweets about austerity is generally higher than during the first weeks considered (see
Figure 1), but also due to the relatively low-intensive nature of campaigns for the
European Parliament elections, which gain some media salience typically only in the
last weeks prior to election day.

Results
A first implication of the election campaign context should be the progressive
reabsorption of online negative sentiment toward austerity into more divisive ‘party
politics’ lines. We thus expect, as stated in the ‘realignment hypothesis’, attitudes
toward austerity to become less massively negative as the campaign goes on because
citizens tend to realign to their latent partisan dispositions at election time. Where
influential political parties, especially parties in office, support austerity measures,
typically presenting these as inevitable, their voters should be encouraged to exit the

10
‘spiral of silence’ that makes a pro-austerity explicit opinion stigmatised in the digital
public sphere, in the presence of an anti-austerity movement of opinion. Of course,
this effect can only be detected at the aggregate level, since the nature of the dataset
does not permit individual-level inferences of opinion change by party preference.
Figure 3a presents the percentage values referencing non-negative sentiment
toward austerity by country over time, each time unit being composed of two weeks.
The realignment hypothesis seems clearly corroborated in the British case, where the
percentage of statements not explicitly hostile to austerity switches from less than 20
percent (average of the two first time units) to nearly 40 percent (last two units, i.e.
final month of campaign). A similar pattern, although weaker in magnitude, can be
observed in Italy (from around 15 percent to 25 percent of non-negative opinions).
Conversely, we observe an opposite trend in France, where the share of non-negative
opinions decreases, namely in the pre-election month, and reaches the minimum
threshold of 10 percent.
*** Figure 3a here ***
Interestingly, the French executive is characterised by the most explicit anti-austerity
discourse among the three countries considered, at least as a consequence of the
presidential campaign that Hollande conducted one year earlier along a relatively left-
wing economic platform, in stark contrast with Sarkozy’s previous administration.
With no ruling parties needing to support or defend the adoption of austerity
measures, and with no opposition parties interested in claiming the ownership of such
a controversial policy, not only did French citizens’ hostility to austerity resist to
realignment effects of the election campaign, it even increased in strength. Rather
than an ever more divisive state of opinion, what we find in the French Twittersphere
is an increasingly monopolistic negative sentiment toward austerity, which is
congruent with the idea of a digital movement of opinion.
*** Figure 3b here ***
The politicisation hypothesis refers, in turn, to the source of digital engagement and
political mobilisation, which we expect to be increasingly driven by party-related
actors (Twitter accounts of parties, MPs, candidates, party activists) as an effect of the
campaign in terms of partisan politicisation. This hypothesis appears to be confirmed
in Italy (+15 percentage points, if we drop the first time unit, given the very small
number of cases) and in France (+10 points between the first and the last weeks of
campaign). On the contrary, no substantive pattern is visible in the UK, where
society-based statements (i.e. posted by ordinary citizens, academics, bloggers,
journalists, media organisations, and various associations), which were already
prevalent in the first pre-campaign period, consolidate further as the campaign goes
on. It is therefore in those digital environments based on party-driven national models
of political mobilisation – rather than civil society-driven (Allum 1995) – that the
election campaign comes to amplify the influence of party politics over the digital
public sphere. By contrast, no specific politicisation effect of the campaign is detected
in a digital environment largely dominated by society-led forms of online
engagement.
*** Figure 3c here ***
When it comes to the Europeanisation hypothesis (Figure 3c), there is no evidence –
contrary to our expectations – of a Europeanising effect of the campaign for the EP

11
election on the online discourse on austerity in the three countries. However, this
outcome probably depends on the specific meaning and structure of the national
debates on austerity at that given time. In the UK, austerity was in effect a well-
established issue on the public agenda, mainly as a consequence of the austerity
measures sequentially implemented by Cameron’s government and the resulting
contestation at the civil society level, both online and offline. Hence, the discourse on
austerity largely tapped the national government’s responsibility and its policy
decisions. In France, on the contrary, mentions of austerity were largely related, at
least at that time, to the Greek and Spanish economic and social crises, often – but not
necessarily – with references to EU-level actors or concepts (e.g. ‘Eurocrats’,
European Central Bank, European finance, etc.). Italy presents an intermediate
pattern, with references to austerity being quite equally split between national and
European framings, and with no specific trend over time. One may hypothesise that
different cross-country degrees of Europeanisation of the debate, both in shape and
dynamics, also reflect national variations in cultural ‘parochialism’ vs. openness to
meta-national news and events. However, a much more systematic analysis of the
Twitter agenda (e.g. trending topics) by country would be necessary to support this
general interpretation.
Finally, we find no support for the ‘funneling’ hypothesis (Table 2). Table 2
reports the results of the VAR analysis to assess Granger causality between Austerity
(mentions of austerity) and Protest (mentions of collective action protests). A number
of tests suggest that, for this analysis, including only one lagged value of each
variable is the optimal choice. The coefficients of the lags and the Wald test for
Granger causality show that (at least in France) the number of mentions of collective
action drives the discussion on austerity – and not the reverse (notice that we find
similar results for Italy too when we include a larger number of lags). Conversely, no
significant effect is detected in the UK. A more fine-grained Lead-Lag analysis
confirms these results.

Table 2. VAR models and tests for Granger causality between mentions of austerity
and mentions of collective action protests in the UK, Italy and France.
UK ITALY FRANCE

Protest (t-1) -0.008 -0.009 0.477*

(0.010) (0.028) (0.200)

Austerity (t)
Austerity (t-1) 0.372** 0.484** 0.244*

(0.103) (0.096) (0.111)

Constant 299.936** 63.786** 27.184*

(51.836) (14.792) (11.798)

N 85 85 85

Granger causality Wald test 0.752 0.097 5.656*

Protest (t) Austerity (t-1) -0.539 -0.161 0.057

12
 (0.981) (0.324) (0.059)

Protest (t-1) 0.552** 0.455** 0.409**

(0.091) (0.096) (0.107)

Constant 1014.094* 76.179 23.347**

(493.917) (50.039) (6.309)

N 85 85 85

Granger causality Wald test 0.303 0.247 0.927

Significance: * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01. Relevant information in italic.

In other words, what seems to happen is (at most) a backlash of action on discourse
rather than the opposite. If we go back to propositions three and four in the theoretical
framework of this chapter, we can confirm that online and offline contestation of
austerity are certainly interconnected, but there is no evidence, in this case, of a
relatively autonomous digital movement of opinion generating offline repercussions.
On the contrary, it may well be that the online debate on austerity follows, rather than
precedes, offline protest events.

Conclusion
Campaign effects in terms of politicisation and realignment of online discourse about
austerity are found in those political contexts in which they were expected to occur.
Namely, politicisation occurs in France, where anti-austerity contestation becomes
less spontaneous and increasingly driven by party politics as election day comes
closer. Realignment characterises mainly the UK, where an apparent digital
movement of opinion against austerity gets partially reabsorbed within the boundaries
of party politics. In the Italian case, both effects are also present. Conversely, and
contrary to our expectations, we have found no increase in the Europeanisation of the
debate during the campaign for the European Parliament, and no funnelling effects of
online contestation into street protest. Quite the opposite, offline protest events seem
to breed more discourse on austerity (at least in France and possibly in Italy), albeit in
terms that tend to become politically more institutionalised due to the campaign
environment.
More broadly, online contestation of austerity in three European countries
such as the UK, France, and Italy provides a paradigmatic example of how social
media empower not only social movements and digitally networked collective action
(Castells 2012; Bennett and Segerberg 2012), but also public opinion in a new digital
form which combines the principles of active citizenry, individual engagement, public
discussion (or contestation), and collective voice. The discourse about austerity on
Twitter during the campaign for the 2014 EP election has presented several features
of what we have defined a ‘digital movement of opinion’, even though not massive in
numbers. Namely, the quasi-monopolistic negative sentiment of statements
mentioning austerity matches well the idealtype described in the theoretical section.
The connection with offline forms of anti-austerity protest is also clear, but
causal relationships cannot be captured in this case because both online and offline
engagement were already present before the time under consideration in this study.
We have reasons to believe that in the specific case of anti-austerity protests a digital

13
movement of opinion was not the origin, but the online reflection and amplification of
what probably originated as a more traditional form of collective action. Even so, it
should be clear that social media platforms represent a powerful public space for
political contestation, and hence a permanent challenge to the legitimacy of national
governments’ and EU-level policies and decisions.
Although the capacity for linking the online discourse on political issues to
supra-national frames is unequally distributed across countries – as shown by very
different levels of Europeanisation of the discussion about austerity – and, most
likely, across issues, the clear presence of a European component in the Twitter
mentions of austerity demonstrates social media’s far-reaching potential of online
discussion, protest amplification, and digital mobilisation about EU politics, with or
without offline extensions.
Citizen empowerment in the European digital sphere and increased
contentiousness of European politics appear to be, in conclusion, two intertwined
consequences of the rise of social media as a networked space for public opinion
formation, circulation, and expression. As the 2015-2016 refugee crisis has suggested
with particular emphasis, the power balance not only within European politics but
also in the EU decision-making process seems to have shifted toward the European
‘social media demos’, the magnitude of which will become clearer in the years and
decades to come.

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Figure 3a. Percentage of non-negative statements about austerity by country over time
(weeks before EP election)

Sentiment toward Austerity

Weeks 01-02
Weeks 03-04
Weeks 05-06
France Weeks 07-08
Weeks 09-10
Weeks 11-12
Weeks 01-02
Weeks 03-04
Weeks 05-06
Italy Weeks 07-08
Weeks 09-10
Weeks 11-12
Weeks 01-02
Weeks 03-04
Weeks 05-06
UK Weeks 07-08
Weeks 09-10
Weeks 11-12

0 20 40 60 80
% Non-Negative

Figure 3b. Percentage of party-driven statements by country over time (weeks before
EP election)

Source of statement
Weeks 01-02
Weeks 03-04
Weeks 05-06
France Weeks 07-08
Weeks 09-10
Weeks 11-12
Weeks 01-02
Weeks 03-04
Weeks 05-06
Italy Weeks 07-08
Weeks 09-10
Weeks 11-12
Weeks 01-02
Weeks 03-04
Weeks 05-06
UK Weeks 07-08
Weeks 09-10
Weeks 11-12

0 20 40 60 80
% party-driven

17
Figure 3c. Percentage of EU-framed statements by country over time (weeks before EP
election)

Type of Framing
Weeks 01-02
Weeks 03-04
Weeks 05-06
France Weeks 07-08
Weeks 09-10
Weeks 11-12
Weeks 01-02
Weeks 03-04
Weeks 05-06
Italy Weeks 07-08
Weeks 09-10
Weeks 11-12
Weeks 01-02
Weeks 03-04
Weeks 05-06
UK Weeks 07-08
Weeks 09-10
Weeks 11-12

0 20 40 60 80
% EU framing

18
Appendix 1

Coding examples of tweets from each of the categories presented in Table 1

I. Party/National

– #MarineLePen : SMIC au rabais : la prochaine étape de l’austérité qu’on impose à la

France francaisdefrance.wordpress.com/2014/04/16/smi… #FN
– RT @labour52rose: In-work poverty will be the legacy of the Tories’ policies of
austerity by @GrahameMorris: labourleft.co.uk/in-work-povert…
– RT @FratellidItaIia: #FdIAn @GiorgiaMeloni: #Austerity cosa ben diversa da
#crescita #iovotoitaliano #scelgogiorgia #alzalatesta #votaMeloni

II. Party/European

– RT @LoisirsCo: #Europeennes2014 contre l #Europe de la finance et de l austérité :

je vote #FrontDeGauche !

– RT @BBCMatthewPrice: Tsipras - leading vote with left-wing Syria in Greece - says

the clear popular message from #EP2014 is austerity must end

– RT @NichiVendola: Un crimine sociale aver impoverito #Ue con austerity. Serve un

consenso a @altraeuropa di #Tsipras, che ha lottato contro quelle politiche

III. Civil Society/National

– RT @MikelonBilbo: 1er Mai 2014: CGT, FO, FSU, Solidaire "Unis contre
l'austérité" - Reportage vidéo: Premier mai pas comme les ... bit.ly/1mjSaLg
– RT @peepsassemblene: How would you like to be part of the No More Austerity
national demonstration in London? We re organising coaches:
facebook.com/events/1438603…
– RT @beppecaccia: #Roma #17M per i #benicomuni e la #democrazia, contro
#austerity e #privatizzazioni globalproject.info/it/in_moviment… #VIDEO
cronaca da @global_project

IV. Civil Society/European

– RT @franceinfo: L EUROPE AU QUOTIDIEN | #Grèce: une crise sociale,

sanitaire et humanitaire due à l austérité bit.ly/FIGrece
pic.twitter.com/2Xl9bKhkyA
– RT @charleslavery: So history is once again repeating in Europe. Austerity
polarises. Dangerous times.Thanks, bankers.
– RT @eurodisastro: Madrid marcia contro l #UE: Una folla oceanica contro gli
eurocrati dell austerity. #Euro Kaputt - #EuroExit pic.twitter.com/0NWBg3TcxX

1
Maireder et al. (2014) provide clear evidence that the overall Twitter debate over the 2014
EP election was comparable in size across the three countries considered. Using language as
an indicator, they find the following distribution of all tweets that mentioned ‘European
election' or ‘European Parliament' in all official EU languages, or used one of several
respective hashtags (#EP2014, #ep14, #eu2014, #PE2014, #eu14 and other country-specific
hashtags): English 245.719; French: 223.804; Italian: 158.305. This suggests that French
users, for instance, have been debating much less than English users about austerity, but not
about EU elections in general.

19