The Commission, the Politics of Information, and the European Public Sphere

Abstract

The seemingly inadequate development of a European public sphere to discuss and form opinions on important matters of public affairs has become an important topic in debates about the European Union’s democratic deficit (European Commission 2006b; Follesdal and Hix 2005).¹ Research focuses on how EU affairs are discussed in or covered by national media (Koopmans and Statham 2010), but also increasingly pays attention to the information and communication policies of the institutions (Martins et al. 2012). This chapter introduces the latter perspective into this volume. Brüggemann (2010, 7) writes that ‘[i]nformation policy is a set of political decisions’, a statement that can also be extended to communication policy. As such, this chapter will predominantly focus on ‘constitutive politics’, that is, on ‘the choices that have to be made in the institutionalization of the provision of information and ... the contestability of these choices and the interests involved’ (Blom, Chapter 2 in this volume).