With the signing of the treaties of Maastricht (1991) and Amsterdam (1997), the European Union (EU) reached a degree of integration that clearly exceeds heretofore known forms of intergovernmental cooperation.
Nowadays the life of EU citizens is affected in many ways by regulations made in the EU’s institutional labyrinth. Due to these far-reaching competencies, a debate on the democratic foundations of the EU polity developed in the 1990s, involving both the social sciences and partly also the broader public. In 1998, Beetham and Lord stated that this debate “takes place in rather narrow terms, where democracy is defined as an institutional arrangement’ with a focus on government structures and their interrelationship”. (Beetham / Lord 1998: 17) Today, this observation is no longer valid. In recent years, one of the long-neglected aspects of European integration increasingly attracts the attention of a growing number of scholars: the political role of a European Public Sphere (EPS). Especially since 2000, a vivid debate developed on how to theoretically and empirically investigate the EPS. In this short period, a number of divergent approaches were developed, using differing theoretical and empirical backgrounds for the study of the EPS. In much of this literature, however, the connection between the theoretical background and the empirical indicators used to study the EPS remains rather unclear. This observation is also made by Mayer, who argues that many political scientists do not sufficiently take into consideration the findings and methods developed within the realm of communication studies and, one should add, applied linguistics.
Scholars working within the latter fields, however, often do not make use of the “’State of the Art’” political scientific studies on European integration. (cf. Meyer 2004: 129) In this paper, I would thus like to make a contribution to clarifying the link between political theory and empirical research. The scope of this paper’s relevance is restricted to the study of the EPS in the media. I am well aware, however, that the public sphere may be misconceived if we restrict our inquiry solely to the media.
Other aspects, such as the role of institutions or of organizations of civil society, require separate treatments with regard to both the theoretical and the empirical study.
