Is EU policy taken out of competition? – A newspaper analysis of government-opposition conflict in Swedish EU politics

Abstract: The purpose of this thesis is to examine the level of conict in the media between the government and the opposition at dierent time periods, and specically regarding EU policies. Opposition towards policy is a crucial ingredient in democratic systems of government that do not only allow the people to send dierent personalities to represent them in government, but rather dierent policy agendas that are, in the end, implemented in their name. To what extent can readers of one Swedish quality newspaper take part in a policy debate over EU policy? The thesis aims to answer this question by specically utilizing the cartel party thesis, in which mainstream parties cooperate to limit policy competition, and iIt proceeds by operationalizing ‘opposition’ and researching 1 092 days of Dagens Nyheter, spread over six half-year periods. I use political claims-making as method to identify relevant articles. Across the investigated time-period I identied just 45 expressions of opposition regarding EU policy, leading to the conclusion that it is all but dead, which has implications for the state of democracy in the EU.