Who lends the EU the ‘right to govern’?: symbolic legitimacy vs. pragmatic policy framing in party communication during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

The Covid-19 crisis as an extreme case of politics was a formidable real-world test for the legitimacy of the EU as decision-making arena. The debate about party political politicisation in the EU has so far focussed mostly on the existence of politicisation, its drivers of and the question of politicisation is a good or a bad thing for European integration. On the basis of reflections derived from Talcott Parson’s idea that formal authority is valid as long as it corresponds to the underlying social belief systems about governance, the paper distinguishes between politicisation of pragmatic aspects of crisis management and of symbolic aspects of the EU as a decision-making arena. Analysing party communication in social media and through official party channels at the moment of most acute crisis, the paper finds that the EU’s ‘right to govern’ is only critically questioned by the extreme right in the seven West European Eurozone countries under examination. The paper opens up a reflection about how to assess empirically the robustness of the EU as a legitimate decision-making arena beyond normative or functional accounts.