Who Frames Europe? Euroscepticism, Radical Right Parties and Elite Twitter Communication

This article examines how political party leaders in six European Union (EU) member states activate EU‐related frames in their Twitter communication between 2007 and 2022. Building on framing theory and politicisation theory, it asks which frames are most prominent, how their salience varies over time and which party‐political and contextual factors account for the use of frames on social media. The analysis relies on an original dataset of 181,615 tweets (14,528 EU‐related) from party leaders in Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. EU‐related tweets are identified through a combination of automated and manual procedures and coded using manual quantitative content analysis for five master‐frames: economic, identity‐cultural, sovereignty, democracy‐legitimacy and security. The descriptive results show that nearly 85% of EU‐related tweets activate none of the five coded frames, and that when frame activation occurs, it is dominated by economic and security perspectives. In contrast, sovereignty, democracy and cultural frames are much less salient in this arena. Explanatory two‐way fixed‐effects models reveal that Euroscepticism and radical‐right party status are the strongest predictors of sovereignty and democracy framing, whilst economic and security frames are more widely used across the spectrum, with non‐linear effects of left–right and Green, Alternative, and Libertarian–Traditional, Authoritarian, and Nationalist placements and selective amplification during the migration crisis and Brexit. Overall, the study shows that explicit EU frame activation on Twitter is sparse, selective and crisis‐sensitive and suggests that politicisation through framing in this arena often takes an episodic form rather than appearing as continuous competition amongst multiple frames.