Europeanization of Public Spheres and EU Legitimation - Czech

Data collection began in April 2015, a period marked by a rapid increase in the number of migrants arriving in Europe, and concluded in March 2016, when the EU reached an agreement with Turkey to reduce irregular migration. I used a media database Newton with full transcripts of television broadcasting and used several keywords: cizin* (foreigner), přistěhoval* (newcomer), uprchl* (refugee), azyl* (asylum), utečen* (refugee), migr* (migrant), imigr* (immigrat). The asterisks serve as a wildcard character, allowing searches based on the root of each word to capture various grammatical forms, as Czech has many cases and inflections. A systematic sampling method (Neuendorf, 2016) was employed to select a representative sample for the period. Three days per week (Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday) were chosen, considering the schedule of popular weekly political debates. Claims from other days were also coded if referenced in the sampled broadcasts.

The dataset for Political Claims Analysis (Koopmans, Statham 1999) comprises 2,372 claims. Following an adapted version of Koopmans' (2004) coding scheme, all instances of claims-making – such as decisions, meetings, interviews, protests, petitions, and others – were coded using the following variables: claimant (actor), addressee, issue, and form. An ordinal variable called „scope” was coded separately for claimant, addressee, and issue, allowing claims to vary in Europeanization across these dimensions. This analysis differs from Koopmans (2004) in treating each opinion as a distinct claim whenever it differs on any variable, even when expressed by the same actor in the same context (e.g., multiple claims within a single interview). Six trained coders conducted the coding, achieving a mean Krippendorff's Alpha of 0.74, indicating substantial agreement. Some variables from Koopmans’ scheme (e.g., object, actor, reference) were excluded due to low scores, while others (e.g., actor, form) were recoded and their categories merged to improve inter-coder reliability.