11 - What Kind of Europeanized Public Politics?

Summary

From the outset, the aim in conducting this research was to address the unanswered questions and myths about the emergence and performance of a European public sphere by recourse to systematic empirical evidence. To examine the impact of European integration on public debate, our research effort was necessarily substantial in size and wide ranging across countries, policies, actors, time, and different media. This concluding chapter synthesizes the main findings on the transformation of political communication into a narrative covering where we have come from, what form of Europeanized public politics has emerged, and what consequences this holds for democratic performance.