ABSTRACT
European Parliament elections are often classified as “second-order” and there are few pan-European media outlets through which European Union (EU) elites can address voters directly. Given these conditions, can online journalism help broaden the scope of European political communication, facilitate interaction across the borders and refocus European Parliamentary election coverage on EU issues? Using an analytical model based on the public sphere, this article assesses online reporting of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections in Greece, Sweden and the United Kingdom, on three levels: publicization; participation; and public opinion formation. The results show that despite the differences between the selected countries in terms of online communication infrastructure and the maturity of the online public sphere, cross-national patterns of European Parliamentary election coverage emerge. This allows for reserved optimism regarding the role of online journalism in the building of a European public sphere.
