Social Networking Sites: an innovative communication on Europe?Analysis in the European Parliament, the European Commission and the European Council

The lack of EU legitimacy is often viewed as a communication deficit (De Vreese & al, 2006; Meyer, 1999). Meyer highlights the role of political communication in legitimating governance. This article proposes to assess whether new public and political communicative spaces are emerging in the European Union as a result of the use of Internet, and more specifically social networking-sites, by political actors and civil servants within European institutions. Digital social networks appear to offer its users a tool for expression which is both personalized and institutionalized, and therefore could fit perfectly in the communication apparatus of European institutions. Moss and Coleman consider three communicative characteristics of the blogs which all relate to impression management (Goffman, 1959): “politicians attempts to seem like ordinary people” (Moss & Coleman, 2008:9), they develop relationships with citizens which are live, spontaneous and direct, they are both “conversing with and listening to the public” (Moss & Coleman, 2008:9). All those three characteristics are today attributed to social media platforms by academics. Therefore there is an injunction for political actors, both in the European Commission and the European Parliament but also – to a lesser extent – in the European Council, to use web 2.0 tools in order to interact with citizens and allow a deliberative democracy to take place. Blumler and Coleman (2010:147) note that “with the emergence and evolution of the Internet, in its many shapes and guises, there has been a range of hopes and speculations about its redemptive potential”. At the European level, this belief is even stronger. Lilleker and Koc-Michalska (2011) emphasize the potential the Internet offers for legitimizing the European Parliament as a democratic institution2: “the European Commission and European Parliament are keen to reduce the democratic deficit which is at the heart of the critiques of politics at the European level”, and therefore they emphasize greater use of the Internet. What are the consequences for European policy makers and what is the impact on European political communication? The aim of this paper is to present the features of EU communication on social networking-sites, looking both at the “systemic (how communication supports legitimacy) and the organizational (how communication is managed) dimension of EU communication” (Valentini & Nesti, 2010:9). In order to identify, describe and analyze the main characteristics of EU digital communication, the article focuses on the three main European institutions (the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Council). It investigates whether social networking-sites (SNS) makes it possible, or not, to overcome the communication deficit of the EU. The article shows that discourses on SNS lead to the blurring of politics and to a consensual form of communication. It highlights the fluctuation in the way the issuer is presenting him or herself, resulting in instability in the way the message is produced, especially in the European Commission. After focusing on civil servants and political actors in the European Commission and Council, the presentation turns to Members of the European Parliament (MEP) and investigates whether social networking-sites have an impact not only on political communication but also on political work in the European Parliament. The aim of the paper is to examine whether the European media ecology has been transformed by social networking-sites, in particular the EU media relations (i.e. interactions with journalists). The article concludes that social networking-sites do not fundamentally alter political work and political communication of European actors. The paper adopts a multi-disciplinary approach that encompasses theories from political science, linguistic, sociology and communication studies. This presentation chooses to focus on actors and practices. This approach justifies the proposed research methodology: participant observation, interviews and discursive analysis