Scholars as European public intellectuals? Media interventions in the 2014 European Parliament election campaign

Since its inception, Europe's unification process has shown periods of discontinuity. The rise of anti-European political parties and the decision of the British government to leave the European Union (EU) are the most recent challenges facing Europe and the composition of the EU. Public debates accompanied each turn of EU's history, but the arenas where these deliberations have taken place were always fragmented, not least because of the diversity of languages and political cultures. Usually public debates occur within one European tongue and rarely cross language barriers. Therefore, mutual familiarity amongst the participants of these discourses is rare; even the most cosmopolitan inhabitant of one EU member state does not follow the debates in all of the others; in practice they perceive only a small sample of foreign contributions. A unified European public sphere, characterized by the use of a mutual lingua franca or established on the basis of a small number of ‘leading’ news outlets followed by a wide proportion of the population throughout the EU, remains far from being achieved.

It is not our ambition to contribute to the conceptualization of the European public sphere. Rather, the focus of this paper is an analysis of scholars from the social sciences and humanities (SSH) contributing interventions in op-ed articles of traditional newspaper media outlets that may be expected to contribute to such a European public sphere. First and foremost, the aim is to identify which kinds of scholars are inclined to express their opinion and, to what ends they do so. The empirical material was gathered during the electoral campaign for the European Parliament (EP) in 2014.

At least since Max Weber's famous lecture on ‘Science as Vocation’ (Weber [1917] 2002), an awareness of the tension between two roles of the academic persona exists; the academic teacher and the professor as a public figure (Kalleberg 2014). Leaving the ‘ivory tower’ and speaking to the public on current affairs is perceived by many, though not all, professors as part of their role set, or even their obligation. Others remain reluctant and practice the proverbial academic ‘unworldliness’. There are no data at hand with regard to the share of professors in favor of one of the opposite interpretations of their role sets, at least not for Europe.¹ But any announcement of annual conferences or world congresses of disciplines that are part of the SSH illustrates the inclination of scholars to retrieve legitimacy by addressing important societal issues beyond the specific concerns of academic audiences. Institutionalized science-to-public schemes further show that those in charge of assessing contemporary scholars reward such practices.² At the same time, the activities of professors in the public arenas are less well documented, compared to the increasingly sophisticated book keeping measures to assess the academic performance.³

Public reasoning is much older than the crystallized role of the university professor. The invention of the ‘intellectual’ as a new kind of public person goes back to the turn of the twentieth century (Brym 2015; Charle 2015). Since then, the contours of the intellectual have changed profoundly. Without going into details, following Jacoby (1987, 2015), one could argue that during the twentieth century independent authors, novelists and essayists of the Emile Zola type have been replaced by white collar employees of the university professor type. Or, in other words: the decline of the ‘traditional’ or universal intellectual à la Jean-Paul Sartre and the rise of ‘new’ or specific intellectuals, who may be eating humble pie when raising their voice on specific topics only (see Foucault 1984 on the distinction of universal and specific intellectuals). To indicate the more recent usage, most authors make use of the term of ‘public intellectual’ to designate those academics participating in public discourse and we follow this direction without further elaboration.

In the following sections we provide a discussion of our research design and data collection procedure. Then our attention turns to presenting the results first in the form of a descriptive report on the properties of the 195 SSH scholars and 262 articles identified in our sample and second to further data exploration using multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). Some general remarks will conclude our paper.

From all options one encounters in studying ‘academics acting as public intellectuals’, we restrict our attention to the following three aspects: first, who are the SSH scholars intervening in Europe; second, are there national differences in participation-patterns and third, on what content-related dimensions do they intervene?

First, we are concerned with public interventions taking place within the boundaries of the EU. We do not enter debates about whether this concept of a European public sphere has an observable representation, or in what form and which stage of development it exists (for sound overviews see Fossum and Schlesinger 2007; Koopmans and Statham 2010; Meyer 2010; Bee and Bozzini 2013; Risse 2015a; Adam 2016). We focus on the participation of academically institutionalized scholars from the SSH in public debates about European topics. These people possess particular professional competences, work in research and educational institutions and contribute to public debates only occasionally; they are not active as regular contributors – like columnists – for newspapers. They present themselves, or were presented by the media, as academics, voices from outside the media landscape who are in a position to contribute to the public debate. Our first set of research questions addresses the following issues: Who with an academic background in SSH is participating in public debates, of which gender, age, academic capital and public status are they? Are there differences or similarities with regard to the disciplines represented?

The second set of questions looks at differences with regard to the national background of the authors. We define national affiliation not via formal citizenship, but current place of residence. In some cases, coding national affiliation causes uncertainties as figures such as Slavoj Žižek lead an increasingly cosmopolitan life that makes a geographic attribution almost impossible. Moreover, even when lecturing at Birkbeck College in London or in Ljubljana, he seldom addresses his interventions to an audience smaller than the global literati, partly because of rather quick translations or parallel publication in more than one language. When examining national differences another topic arises, which deserves clarification. Research demonstrated the existence of different types of national media systems in Europe and beyond (Brüggemann et al. 2014; Büchel et al. 2016; Hallin and Mancini 2017). We cannot, however, enter the debate on the construction and validation of these types here, as the empirical data are too specific regarding its focus on public intellectuals and too restrained to characterize the media landscape of entire countries. Our research is restricted to the contributions from SSH academics, which precludes topics such as the amount of influence on media from political parties, or the degree of professionalization and autonomy of the field of journalism. Nonetheless, in this research there seems to be a consensus with regard to two facts at the center of our endeavor: first, a so-called quality press exists in all types of media systems and second, some, or even the majority, of these quality outlets run op-ed pages. With regard to national differences, we are interested in two sets of questions: first, from a comparative perspective: Do we find different degrees of participation of academic public intellectuals in member states of the EU? Are there any indications that national particularities have any consequences for the participation in public discourse by SSH scholars? Are there differences between old and new EU member states, between large and small countries etc.? And second, from the border-crossing perspective: Which kinds of scholars engage in cross-national interventions? Do certain newspapers host these ‘foreigners’ more often than others?

Third, we are interested in discovering something about the content of the public statements of the scholars acting as public intellectuals. The spectrum of outreach activities of the professoriate is broad and each and every one of them is worthy of study. Scholars communicating to and with the public have chosen many paths. In the early days of television, they hosted educational programs to engage with the wider public, more recently they have used podcasts, video-platforms or specific conference formats such as Ted Talks, and even filled football stadiums (Alfred Kinsey, to give an example), amongst other methods. Nevertheless, the default medium of communication seems to remain the written word, more specifically an opinion piece of more than 140 characters. We argue that op-eds are a strategically important research material to study some specifics of SSH scholars’ roles as public intellectuals. Op-ed articles have a long history and thus form a privileged space of public intervention. Further, editors of newspapers function as gatekeepers of these spaces, which differentiates them from blogs and other kinds of expression the scholar can fully control by themselves. A welcome side effect of this restricted access to public space is the limited number of instances available for study. It is much easier to develop a sampling strategy for op-ed articles than for the universe of micro-blogging. Focusing on these kind of texts allows us to use an international comparative research design. We seek answers to questions such as: What are SSH scholars debating in the public sphere? Do academics present research findings there, in a similar way to the early history of public understanding of science? Or do they follow the traditional understanding of intellectuals speaking truth to the sovereign? Does the established distinction of experts vs. (universal) intellectuals find any resonance in the present day?

Our data collection followed three methodological considerations: finding a European-wide stimulus of similar importance in every national context; concentrating on traditional newspaper media to allow for a broader range of countries to be compared; and a focus on op-ed articles, which encompass both expertise and opinions.

Public intellectuals do not show any predictability concerning when they become involved in public discourse. There are no benchmarks that could be used to predict whether a particular issue will be challenged by scholars’ public interventions and, when they do intervene, their motives are not communicated. Very often, however, public intellectuals react to something that came into existence without their interference; they react, they do not set the public agenda autonomously. Even one of the most famous transnational interventions – the plea for a common European foreign and defense policy jointly written by Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Habermas and Derrida 2003) – was a reaction to the impending invasion of Iraq by the US and its allies. Thus, to carry out a cross-national comparative analysis of public media interventions of SSH scholars, one is well advised to look for a common stimulus that might invite intellectuals to come forward with their opinions. The EP election campaign is such a common stimulus. Preceding an election, mass media outlets are requested to cover this particular issue and might therefore be more willing to open their pages to outside commentators. At the same time, elections are a quintessential part of modern democracy and might therefore trigger the willingness of an academic to raise their voice. Finally, for pragmatic reasons, choosing the period around an election, in contrast to reacting spontaneously to an unforeseen event, facilitates the planned coordination of a multinational research team.

The concrete stimulus used to reach as broad a spectrum of contributions as possible from as many different SSH disciplines as possible was the campaign for the EP in 2014. At the time, 751 seats were to be filled in the EP and the candidates originated from 28 member states of the EU, historically the largest constituency.

The second methodological step consisted of restricting the media outlets relevant for this study. Although it would have been promising to select what is referred to as ‘new social media’, we agreed to stick to the established forum for exchanging ideas; printed newspapers.⁴ It has been established that social networks, blogs, messenger services, etc. have become influential in recent political affairs (Baert and Booth 2012; Thijssen 2013). A sampling strategy able to take into account cross-national spheres is difficult to imagine and implement, however. Certain new media outlets are rather short-lived and others become famous only in hindsight. We omitted them in our study design for a more practical reason; assessing the relevance and scope of new social media in nine different countries and languages entails major difficulties of inter-coder reliability, not least as the authors of this paper are only familiar with less than half of them.

In concentrating on the old-fashioned media newspaper, the assumption that we could find comparable outlets in more than a handful of EU member states has been vindicated. The establishment of so-called op-ed pages in broadsheet newspapers around the world is itself an interesting process of institutional isomorphism, but its historical analysis is beyond the scope of this paper.⁵ Articles in the so-called quality press are a ‘relatively more nuanced set of commentaries’ (Jacobs and Townsley 2011) and the quality press is more exclusive, both with regard to the ‘gallery publics’ and the ‘arena of speakers’ (Risse 2015b: 6–8). We preferred quality newspapers and their op-eds for another reason. Usually contributors to op-ed pages are introduced to the readers with some biographical information, which became the sampling point for our study. Whenever a discipline from the SSH was mentioned, the article was selected and the biographical information coded.⁶

Selecting op-eds from broadsheet newspapers offers another advantage; we could set apart our analysis from predecessors. Several studies, on the European public sphere in particular, selected newspapers as their units of analysis. Van de Steeg (2006) analyzed ‘quality press’ and ‘popular press’ from six countries to investigate the sanctions of the EU-14 against Austria in 1999/2000, but studied all kind of articles published. Eilders and Voltmer (2003) did the same for an earlier period by sticking only to ‘commentaries’ published in German newspapers, but who the authors of these commentaries were remained opaque. They were definitely journalists, but were they also commentators from outside the editorial staff? Koopmans and his collaborators (Koopmans 2015) used a set of newspapers from seven Western European countries and combined quality and tabloid press. De Vreese et al. (2006) analyzed the 2004 EP campaign very broadly, but did not discuss the authors of the news. Again the study seems not to distinguish between internal and external contributors of articles. The same must be said for Kantner's (2015) longitudinal study of newspaper reporting of humanitarian military interventions, which looks at 16 years of reporting and reaches out to new EU member states such as Poland, but does not differentiate between types of producers of these texts (similar restrictions apply to Esser and Umbricht (2013)). Only Meyer (2010: esp. 179, 195–204) differentiates between the authors of public contributions in his analysis of broadsheet newspapers’ reporting from 1969 to 1991. From this short overview of comparable studies, it becomes clear that our design accords with some predecessors with regard to the selection of media and the classification of their content (see below), but deviates with regard to the countries covered and, in particular, the concentration on external contributors only.⁷ So far, op-eds written by SSH scholars have not been studied extensively. Jeanpierre and Mosbah-Natanson (2009) studied contributions in Le Monde, and Jacobs and Townsley (2011) produced the most comprehensive study so far, but it is restricted to the US. Korom (2014) is the first and, to the best of our knowledge, only study that is transnational and compares public intellectuals and experts. We agree, therefore, with a recent state-of-the-art report that highlights that existing research ‘suffers from […] a dearth of comparative frames that would assist in generalizing the results of research on specific national fields’ (Eyal and Buchholz 2010: 128).

A final remark on the exclusion of television: Ciaglia (2013) and Meijers (2013) demonstrate that analyzing television makes sense if one is interested in the news itself, but that it is not overly helpful if the ‘messenger’ is the focal point of interest. European TV channels seldom air ‘speaker-shows’ (Jacobs and Townsley 2011). TV shows other than news programs are sometimes open to appearances by scholars and other non-insiders, but if one is interested in the content and message of a singular individual, they are not easy to identify by analyzing talk shows, for example. Further, we are suspicious that several of the talk show prone intellectuals are no longer scholars. We do concede, however, that our exclusion of TV formats could be disputed.

The comparative research design brings several limitations. We cannot judge whether op-eds affect public opinion either in political campaigns or in intellectual debates in a broader sense. Their immediate influence might be negligible. On the other hand, however, there is good reason to suppose that some ideas make their way from the academic world of SSH into the vernacular (Merton and Wolfe 1995). The very concept ‘public sphere’ goes back to Habermas’ study on the historical roots of this institution ([1962] 1990). Finally, we did not investigate at the micro level how a text written by an SSH scholar makes its way into the print edition of a newspaper. Neither our collaborators nor we studied the role of potential intermediaries of the PR agency type, or those of editors. What follows is less concerned with the analysis of particular media than with authors of articles appearing on op-ed pages of ‘quality’ newspapers. Or, to formulate it in the traditional terminology of early media studies: we are interested in the characteristics of the individual sender and their messages, but not in the receivers’ reactions or the carriers of the messages.

Together with a number of colleagues throughout Europe, we collected op-ed newspaper articles discursively related to the 2014 EP election that were written either by or about scholars from the SSH in nine member states of the EU: the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania and the UK. All articles were published in print editions of quality (‘broadsheet’) newspapers between 30 April and 1 June 2014: roughly four weeks prior to, and one week after, the EP elections. The election took place between 22 and 25 May 2014. The results from all 28 member states were announced after polling stations closed on the night of Sunday 25 May.

The collaborators were instructed to select articles when the authors (or interviewees) could be explicitly identified by their disciplinary or academic affiliation.⁸ Thus this selection procedure excludes articles that make use of SSH knowledge by merely citing academic sources. Further, the collaborators received instructions to select articles only when there was direct or indirect relevance for the EP elections. Contributions by SSH scholars where thus excluded when there was no connection to the parliamentary election campaign, as in the case of a professor from the humanities discussing a literary work of European value. From the perspective of an imagined European reader, it is highly improbable that anyone would have read all op-ed articles selected throughout our sample. However, this fictitious reader would supposedly have recognized the author of the piece as an academic scholar from the SSH and the topic as being related to the elections, or the conception of the EU in a broader sense. Counterfactually our sample of op-eds encompasses what an idealized reader concerned with European affairs and the impact of academic public intellectuals would have read during five weeks in the spring of 2014.

Even though our main concern is with SSH scholars as public intellectuals, some results are based on newspaper articles as the main unit of analysis. For example, when determining which SSH discipline is most present in the public sphere, we rely on the number of articles coming from different disciplines, not the number of authors with varied disciplinary backgrounds. This provides us with the opportunity to consider multiple contributions by the same SSH author. Therefore, two datasets were established and used depending on the variables and questions dealt with. Dataset A is organized by SSH scholars who contributed newspaper articles and includes information on personal characteristics (discipline, age, gender, different forms of academic reputation). In dataset B, each row stands for one article allowing for multiple entries per contributor.

For each of the nine countries considered, we analyzed between two and three widely read newspapers distributed along the left-right political spectrum (for an overview see the appendix).⁹

There are large differences in the number of identified contributions by SSH scholars, not only between countries, but also between news outlets within a single country. We want to emphasize that the strong representation of the Czech and French newspapers Právo, Le Monde and Libération, does not result from oversampling but from a strong inclination of the editors of these newspapers to include commentaries by SSH scholars. However, we caution against over-interpreting these differences as a direct measure of how much space a given newspaper grants to knowledge or research from the SSH more generally. Such a statement would require an analysis of the full newspaper content, which is beyond the scope of this study. Figure 1 also shows the dominance of article contributions by political scientists as a consistent trend across all newspapers. Different topics related to the EP elections, such as low turnout despite attempts to expand the Parliament's power, or different modalities of votes are much discussed in political science, and election campaigns more generally offer a rewarding topic of discussion for speakers from this academic background. The strong presence of political scientists lies within the nature of the thematic stimulus, since elections and their environments are the core research agenda for political science. Nevertheless, the op-eds discussing the EP election from the perspective of analyzing electoral procedures or the campaign – topics over which political scientists have something of a monopoly – cover only some of the articles written by political scientists and only a fraction of the 262 sampled articles. The vast majority of articles take up the issue of the election from a broad array of thematic angles. The implication that the ‘EP election’ stimulates contributions from certain disciplines more than others is thus, with the partial exception of political science, not warranted.

In what follows, we concentrate on the 195 SSH scholars who contributed the 262 articles. Only 29 authors published more than one article. Particularly productive authors were the Czech sociologist Jan Keller, who campaigned successfully for a seat in Strasbourg and published eight op-ed articles as part of his personal campaign. Another Czech author, the political scientist Jiří Pehe, a regular commentator in the national and international media landscape, contributed the same number of articles. In third place is the French economist Thomas Piketty who published four times in newspapers from different countries and thus managed to address different audiences. It is reasonable to assume that interventions by a candidate (Keller) and someone whose recently published book had made headlines (Piketty) were not solely motivated by their interpretation of their role as scholars acting as public intellectuals.¹⁰ Only two participants in the debate around the EU's election day were non-Europeans: Joseph Stiglitz and James Galbraith (both American) offered their views on economic issues, with particular focus on the financial crisis, and embedded their commentaries within the debates around the parliamentary campaign.

Male authors wrote an overwhelming majority of the articles. The British, German and Greek newspapers in our sample did not feature a single article written by a female SSH scholar. In contrast, Romania's România Liberă, had by far the highest share of female contributions, with more than a third of their relevant articles written by women. The country with the second highest rate of female contributions, Denmark, still shows a male domination of 85% (see Table A1 in the appendix). Given these figures, the differences between newspapers are less interesting than the general result that female SSH scholars appear to take part in public debates much less than might be expected given their relative weight in academia.¹¹ No statistical connections can be established with other gender-related indicators, such as country ranks from the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Ranking from 2014.¹² Further studies would be needed to answer to the obvious question: Why do we see no public interventions (on European matters) by British, German or Greek women from the SSH? (For a tentative answer see Evans 2009).

Table 1 displays the differences between disciplines. Unsurprisingly, political scientists contributed more than a third of all SSH contributions in our sample and so receive a great deal of leadership in current political debates on Europe and beyond. They stand out in age, gender distribution and national interventions. Political science is the group with the second lowest average age in the sample, 52 years, and has the highest female representation. Their interventions are predominantly nationally bound, with only 7.3% of contributions appearing in ‘foreign’ media (‘foreign’ being defined as a contribution by an author who neither originates from, nor is professionally affiliated to, the country of publication).

Political scientists had the most competition from contributors from economics and sociology for access to public fora during and after the 2014 EP election campaign. These two disciplines differ in many respects, however. Economists tend to reach out to audiences beyond the boundaries of their place of residence; a third of all contributions by economists appeared in ‘foreign’ newspapers. Sociologists are significantly older than the average, second only to philosophers, and the contributors are overwhelmingly male. Their cross-border activities are below average at 10.2% of articles in foreign newspapers. The high academic and public recognition of some contributing sociologists, their overall great age, and the almost total lack of women gives the impression that public sociology's splendor resides largely in the past.

The third group of SSH disciplines with some public visibility in European newspapers comprises philosophers, legal scholars and historians. Philosophers, while being the oldest, have the highest share of female contributors after political scientists. The group of legal scholars is entirely male.

There is no intrinsic reason why sociologists should comment more often than historians, or why law professors came forward less frequently than economists (Kalleberg 2012; Mata and Medema 2014). The relative strong showing of philosophy, for example, might be related to the routine of philosophers in entering the public sphere, although one should bear in mind that the size of an academic disciplines’ population in Europe is unknown.¹³ Our findings suggest that scholars from the SSH entering public debates are in no way a representative sample of the general SSH population. In Germany, for example, the average age of professors in the SSH is close to 50 (Destatis 2016: 148, 150), which means that only law and, to a certain degree, political science contributors come close to that picture. For Germany, the female representation of SSH professors is also considerably higher, although still unbalanced at about 30% (Destatis 2016: 121, 126).

Posner (2001) argues that SSH academics engage in public intellectual work only after acquiring a solid reputation within their discipline. The impact and relationship of ‘scientific capital’ (Bourdieu 1988) and/or public prestige – recognition beyond their field of specialization – on public interventions by SSH scholars remains unexplored for Europe. Are public interventions characteristic only of academics who score high on pure scientific capital and/or on public prestige? There are no published data available offering measurement of the reputation of scholars acting as public intellectuals. Therefore, we had to create our own measure and gathered two distinct datasets. As an indication of academic reputation (or scientific capital), we calculated each SSH scholar's Hirsch-Index (2005).¹⁴ As a proxy for public prestige, we counted the number of languages in which Wikipedia biographies are available for each author.

Both measures have limitations and neither is beyond criticism.¹⁵ The h-index has been criticized because of some serious weaknesses (e.g. an individual's score cannot decrease by definition; see for further criticisms and discussion: Gingras 2016), yet it works well for senior scholars who follow established publication strategies. We expected that the majority of the scholars sampled would conform sufficiently to these assumptions. Also, using Wikipedia entries as an indicator for a scholars’ public recognition requires justification. We have observed that the number of separate biographical entries – that are not necessarily translations into other languages – depends not only upon scholarly reputation, but also on the public recognition that is conferred to SSH scholars. Thus, distinguished academics – such as political scientist Klaus F. Zimmermann or legal scholar Dieter Grimm – are credited with only one version in a language other than German, which substantiates our assumption that Wikipedia entries can be independent of scientific recognition; neither of these two scholars is well known to a larger public.

It is surprising, therefore, that in the sample for this study the resulting Wikipedia-Index and Hirsch-Index show a high correlation of .86 (Pearson, sign at .01). Grimm and Zimmermann are outliers with an h-index of 26 and 52, respectively (which means that they each published on average 26 and 52 ‘papers’ respectively that were quoted by others at least 26 or 52 times each).

Top scoring SSH scholars in Figure 2 belong to the category of ‘old men’ – Jürgen Habermas (1929–), Joseph Stiglitz (1943–), Anthony Giddens (1938–), Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017), Ulrich Beck (1944–2015)—followed by the first woman on rank 9, the Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller (1929–). With regard to their combined reputational ranking, three of the first five SSH scholars are sociologists.¹⁸ These leading figures are highly cosmopolitan and their media contributions have a pronounced international dimension.

Comparing scholarly reputation across newspapers and countries reveals further interesting results (see Table A1 in the appendix). We find that the two Italian newspapers – Corriere della Sera and Repubblica – feature an impressive number of senior SSH scholars of the highest repute. This is reflected in these authors’ average h-index of 53.6. This is a remarkably high value when compared to sampled newspapers in countries such as France and Germany, which come next in line but, on a national average, are both slightly below 20 on the same scale. Together with the UK and Denmark, the editors in these countries were more successful in recruiting the most prominent SSH scholars than in the remaining set of countries. Somewhat surprisingly, Denmark ranks alongside these big countries. In Denmark, high-prestige SSH authors in our sample usually publish their contributions in Politiken. In our case many of these authors are affiliated with the Bonn-based research institute, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).¹⁹ Other international contributions – such as those by Thomas Piketty and Timothy Garton Ash – however, show that Politiken provides space for international SSH scholars on a regular basis. Scholars publishing op-ed articles in newspapers from the Czech Republic, Greece and Romania carry significantly less scholarly recognition. Most probably, this is an indirect effect of the size of the countries, the preferred language of academic publishing and ethnocentric practices of referencing.

To summarize, the descriptive analysis of the SSH scholar population contributing op-ed articles in traditional quality print media during the EP electoral campaign 2014 points to the fact that these contributors are relatively homogeneous in gender and age, but rather diverse in reputation and disciplinary affiliation. Only a small number of academic ‘superstars’ surmount the still remarkably high fences that separate the member states of the EU.

The question of whether a public sphere exists that encompasses all EU member states is a contested one. Theoreticians like Habermas argue persuasively that only if such a space can be built will the EU have legitimacy and a chance of maturing into a postnational entity (2015). While we cannot enter into this debate, we will investigate to what extent intellectuals from SSH disciplines were inclined to write on European issues beyond national borders and address issues from a European perspective during or after the 2014 EP elections, thus acting as what we like to call the avant-garde of postnational – or ‘truly’ European – intellectuals.

To measure the ‘EUropeanness’²⁰ of media contributions, we coded each article's content according to a scheme differentiating three dimensions of interest in the predominant focus of any given author's article: domestic issues; trans- or international relations (IR) and EU issues. Each dimension is represented by a binary variable (yes/no). The first variable captures all contributions in which the EP election was debated only (or primarily) from a home guard position; that is, visualizing the Strasbourg-Brussels EP as an outpost of the single nation-state's political spectrum. The second variable indicates whether Europe is discussed in the given article mostly as a global player. In most cases, the slackening power of Europe in world politics is bemoaned (it should be remembered that at this time Russia's attacks on Ukraine were a topic of current international affairs). The third variable is coded ‘yes’ if a contribution focuses on issues located at the level of the EU, such as the role of the EP in the creation and control of the EU budget.²¹

To construct the ‘space of opinion’ (Jacobs and Townsley 2011) of public intellectuals from the SSH, we combined multidimensional typologies of intellectuals with the content of commentaries. We use MCA as a tool for the visualization of combined characteristics of public intellectuals, such as academic prestige or disciplinary background. MCA allows us to condense a number of characteristics and to present this information in a relational graph (Greenacre 2007). This graph represents a ‘cloud’ of individuals and of modalities that together produce a space and allocate individuals different positions in the field to it. The more closely individuals are situated to each other in the ‘space of opinion’, the more modalities they have in common. In the MCA, we also included whether an SSH scholar contributed mostly to domestic affairs, international politics or EU politics. This information is based on all registered authors (dataset A).

Thus, the first (horizontal) axis distinguishes those who are renowned scholars and are widely known in the public from those who are rarely cited by their peers and likely to have made a name only in a single European country. The ‘top dogs’²³ are comparatively old and their main interest is in topics that have a marked international dimension but do not concern concrete EU issues. These contributions are mostly published in Italian (and, to a much lesser degree, in French) newspapers. The ‘under dogs’ – often coming from political science – typically publish their commentaries in Greece and, to a lesser extent, in the Czech Republic and Romania. Explicit discussions of EU issues are virtually absent from these contributions.

The vertical axis in Figures 4 and 5 is dominated by four variables that jointly explain about 81% of its variance: country where the newspaper is published (27.2%); EU issues (22.6%); disciplines (19.2%) and domestic issues (11.8%). The 13 categories that have been retained for the interpretation of this second axis together explain 81.7% of the variance. In the lower half of the second axis we find the following categories: EU issues+ (15.4%); Denmark (11.5%); economics (7.5%) and domestic issues− (3.3%). In the upper left quadrant, the following categories are located: Italy (6.1%); IR issues+ (3.5%), sociology (3.3%); philosophy (3.2%)and wiki: 11–19 entries (2.8%). In the upper right quadrant, we find domestic issues+ (8.5%), EU issues− (7.2%), Romania (6.6%) and other discipline (2.8%)

These patterns suggest that the vertical axis stands above all for the ‘EUropeanness’ of the newspaper contributions. While articles by economists often revolve around politics at the European level, especially if they are published in Danish newspapers, other scholars shied away from EU issues when publishing a commentary during the campaign for the EP. We can identify a two-headed split: sociologists and political scientists write more broadly on IR issues (upper left quadrant); and others, partly from the same disciplines and often publishing in Romania, have a preference for debating domestic politics.

It is striking that those contributing articles covering IR issues – such as the Ukrainian crisis or European power politics – are situated far away from articles dealing with EU issues. This pattern mirrors the fact that economists tend to elaborate on concrete economic problems common to many EU member states while philosophers and sociologists tend to develop more abstract perspectives on European societies in their wider international context. The position of the EU in the field of global power relations seems to be seen by these authors of op-eds independently from the particularities of EU policies. Given the fact that the EU does not possess its own military, this ambiguity is less surprising. Europe's global standing depends much more on NATO and the single nation states’ international power, as veto powers in the UN Security Council, for example.

Despite the fact that the country-variable ‘loads’ on the vertical axis, we warn against interpreting this as an effect of specific national media systems. Our sample, being limiting to only a few newspapers per country and covering only op-ed contributions from SSH scholars, is too small to safely draw such conclusions. This caution is supported by the fact that countries in our MCA do not group according to any known pattern of media systems. Compared with the influential typology of media systems by Hallin and Mancini (2004, 2012, 2017), who differentiate three types – a Mediterranean or polarized pluralist (France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain); a North/Central European or democratic corporatist (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland) and an Atlantic or liberal model (Great Britain, the USA, Canada and Ireland) – our data do not show any coherence with these country groupings. Instead, Italy, France and Greece, all of which belonging to a single type (Mediterranean), lie furthest apart from each other on the horizontal axis.

Figure 5 shows where individual SSH scholars are located in the ‘opinion space’ mapped out previously. It seems feasible to associate each quadrant with some commonly known authors. The upper left quadrant could be called the ‘playfield’ of Bauman, Beck, Giddens, Habermas and Heller and the lower left the one of Ash, Galbraith, Piketty and Stiglitz. While these two factions of public intellectuals belong to different disciplines, tend to publish in different newspapers and differ with regard to the EUropeaness of their interventions, they both score comparatively high on academic reputation and public prestige.

The two quadrants at the right are less prominently populated, containing Boboc, Keller, Mungiu-Pippdi and Pehe (upper half) and Fejerskov, Fouskas and Wind (lower half). The faction located in the upper half has a clear profile. Its members are mostly from newer EU member states and Greece, discuss exclusively European topics from the perspective of what they mean to their home countries and carry little academic and public recognition.

In general, the identified factions indicate different types of intellectuals populating the space of opinion. In the upper left quadrant, we find those that resemble the ‘universal intellectual’ who sees his or her role as enlightening the public through the power of the word and providing interpretative frameworks through which European matters ought to be seen, rather than discussing concrete policy issues; Europe as an abstract idea, not as daily practice. Zygmunt Bauman epitomizes these intellectuals.

All other quadrants are populated by ‘new’ types of specific intellectuals who may engage with the public in very different ways, but are less inclined to infuse the public with their worldviews. Their media commentary builds on discipline-specific, expert knowledge. Often, they explain particular technical details, likely consequences of international treaties or economic policies. This does not necessarily mean that they refrain from expressing opinions, but that the power of their argument rests on factual, rather than moral, reasoning and their objects of debate are typically specific rather than general. Since the publication of his seminal book Capital in the Twenty-First Century and his many media interventions, Thomas Piketty perhaps best represents this type of what Medvetz has labeled ‘hybrid expert-intellectual’ (Medvetz 2012: 42, 137, passim).

By conceiving the 2014 EP election campaign as a common stimulus throughout the EU, we were able to collect media commentaries from SSH scholars in selected newspapers in nine EU member states. Our sample of 262 articles by SSH scholars allows us to report on media interventions at the level of author-related variables and provide a broad categorization of the content. Given the explorative nature of this study, we initially defined intellectuals broadly, recognizing the variety of social roles SSH scholars perform. To conclude, we synthesize results and link them to the crucial question: in what way do public intellectuals from the SSH contribute to European public spheres?

Our data indicate several differences concerning the form and content of contributions, as well as the type of contributors. First, and quite obviously, different newspapers offer SSH scholars different proportions of their space for their commentaries. Scholars acting as public intellectuals in public debates are substantially more heterogeneous than the literature would lead one to expect. Recent debates on the changing roles of (public) intellectuals stem mostly from the US (Jacoby 1987; Posner 2003; Jacobs and Townsley 2011; Jacoby 2015; see also Kalleberg 2012; Brym 2015; Turner 2015). One could question their applicability for European affairs, but research on European intellectuals strives for explanations predominantly at the national level (Judt 1992; Lepenies 1992; Collini 2006; Kauppi 2010; Bering 2011). Our data point to an alternative search for cross-national similarities and differences amongst disciplines and the specific interpretation of the role of intellectual interventions in the public sphere; the European theater might be, once again, much more heterogeneous than expected. There remain two commonalities; SSH scholars participating in public debates are mostly men belonging to the older generation, yet they differ in reputation, disciplinary affiliation and thematic focus. The reputation of scholars in the sampled articles varies widely. However, by aggregating them at a disciplinary level, we demonstrate that sociology and economics show a much higher scholarly and public reputation than other disciplines. Comparing the topics of the articles reveals that economists discussed European (EU) issues more often than others; sociologists and philosophers are at the opposite end of this scale. Surprisingly, sociologists and political scientists devoted more effort to domestic issues than representatives of other disciplines. Denominating those scholars that resemble our sample of economists as ‘truly European public intellectuals’ would subsequently lead to the conclusion that – where it exists –the European public sphere shows a high degree of family resemblance with the core understanding of the EU as an economic union and its focus on the common market as well as its prerequisites.

Using MCA enabled us to demonstrate that differences between individual public intellectuals can be aggregated into a multidimensional picture. First, philosophers and sociologists of high repute are different to economists of similar high repute. The spectrum of the not-so-well-recognized SSH authors runs from North-West Europe to South-East Europe. Second, and more importantly, three groups of contributors can be characterized, two of which contribute to what one might refer to as a European public sphere. The third group identified, however, can be characterized as not EUropean at all. Authors in this group carry little academic and public recognition and discuss European issues, if at all, exclusively from a domestic-centered position. The majority of these authors come from the new EU member states (and ‘older’ Greece). The ‘truly European public intellectual’ does not exist in this group; a corollary of this finding is that economists from the new member states differ from their colleagues in the old EU member states.

Thus only two groups remain to mold the European public sphere: the traditional ‘universal intellectuals’; and the more specific ‘expert intellectuals’. On the one hand, SSH scholars representing the classic idea of an intellectual that offers general interpretations of broad topics of great scope but little commentary on specific questions concerning the EU as a functioning political institution. This group is of exceptionally high academic and public prestige, of advanced age and strongly associated to the disciplines of sociology and philosophy. On the other, the distinct second group, embodies the ‘newer’ type of public expert. These scholars are younger, focus their contributions on more concrete questions related to their scholarly expertise, are often associated with economics, and provide the most direct debate on issues related to the EU itself. Also, this group shows the highest inclination to publish op-eds in newspapers outside their home countries or countries of residence.

The clear-cut division between these two groups highlights the fact that the discourse on the European idea, which has provided the intellectual fabric for the European unification process since the end of World War II, is fundamentally decoupled from current debates oriented towards practical political issues related to the EU as an evolving political institution.

Only the young experts contributed explicitly to a European public sphere dealing with the EU as political reality. Although they act internationally and take into account inter- or transnational issues, the ‘traditional intellectuals’ refrain from doing this. It is only the properties and the kind of interventions by the young experts that supports the existence of a genuinely European public expert. Thus we conclude that skepticism regarding the contribution to a European public sphere – as segmented as it might be – is supported by the geographical exclusiveness and decoupled contributions of traditional intellectuals and young experts.

Christian Fleck has written his contribution within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and supported within the framework of a subsidy granted to the HSE by the Government of the Russian Federation for the implementation of the Global Competitiveness Program. We thank Karina Fernandez for methodical advice.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Matthias Duller, postdoctoral researcher in the department of sociology, University of Graz. Fields of research: History and sociology of the social sciences, Comparative historical sociology, Cold War.

Philipp Korom Dr. in Sociology from the University of Graz/Austria. Previous positions include: (Senior) Researcher at the European University Institute/Florence and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies/Cologne. Fields of research: wealth inequality, elites, intellectuals and social networks.

Rafael Y. Schögler: Assistant Professor in Translation Studies from the University of Graz/Austria. He was visiting researcher at CTIS University of Manchester and CenTras UCL London in 2017. Research interests include Sociology of Translation, Translation Studies, Research Policy in the SSH.

Christian Fleck, Professor of sociology at the University of Graz and Chief Research Fellow, Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies, Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Research interests: sociology and history of the social sciences.