• carry out a pilot content analysis of the news in the campaign for the 2009 European elections in all 27 member states of the EU.
• ensure that the data can be linked to the other data collected in this design study.

We intend to keep as much continuity as possible with media studies we have conducted in 1999 and also in 2004 in terms of data sources and methodology (within the framework of the European Election Studies – EES). We will explore similar questions on Europeaness of news coverage, agenda setting, economic voting, framing and mobilisation. We intend to build a longitudinal study comprising both 1999 and 2004 and 2009 studies. The substantive innovation would be including new themes and creating explicit links with the voter and party manifesto components. We thus welcome proposals and comments from the social science community on new coding categories and themes (see Open Forum).

Methodologically, we will adopt a centralised model of capturing and coding.

Our study will give due consideration to the aim of building an infrastructure for future studies while evaluating different options and trade-offs between costs and data quality. After the collection and cleaning of data, we will provide a codebook and write a report on the quality of the data, and make the data and its codebook publicly available.

During the final phases of the design study, the team will evaluate the pilot study and provide a report that will outline technical and design aspects of the pilot study. This general evaluation will eventually feed into to the final conceptual design report.