Conceptualizing and Measuring the Political Salience of EU Legislative Processes

Beyers, Jan and Dür, Andreas and Wonka, Arndt (2015) Conceptualizing and Measuring the Political Salience of EU Legislative Processes. [Conference Proceedings] (Submitted)

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Abstract

Salience, which can be broadly understood as the importance actors attribute to a political matter, is a key concept in political science. It has been shown to affect diverse matters such as the behaviour of interest groups and decision-makers in concrete policymaking processes as well as citizen attitudes and their voting behaviour. However, quite regularly salience is differently conceptualized and operationalized within and between different political science subfields, which raises questions of theoretical (non-) complementarity and conceptual boundaries as well as of measurement validity. In this paper we review how salience is conceptualized and measured in studies on public opinion, interest groups, political communication and EU legislative policy-making. Empirically, we probe the (non-) complementarity of different conceptualizations with original data on EU legislative policymaking. To do so, we draw on datasets developed in a large project on EU interest group politics (INTEREURO). For a sample of 125 legislative processes initiated by the European Commission (between 2008 and 2010) we combine evidence on salience collected through in-depth analyses of five media-outlets and interviews with 70 Commission experts as well as with 143 interest group representatives.

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