Béthoux, ÉlodieÉlodieBéthouxErne, RolandRolandErneGolden, DarraghDarraghGolden2018-03-052018-03-052018 the A2018-03-05British Journal of Industrial Relationshttp://hdl.handle.net/10197/9270We aim to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics that are driving EU politicisation and the rising Euroscepticism of workers and unions in the public sphere. One explanation frames the rise in Euroscepticism in cultural terms, emphasising workers' alleged primordial attachment to their nation. A second uses socio-economic frames, linking growing Euroscepticism to the increasingly neo-liberal direction of the EU. The weight of these competing frames in the referendum campaigns on the EU Constitution in France and the Lisbon Treaty and the Fiscal Treaty in Ireland cannot be measured easily, as the categorisation of a phrase as socio-economic or cultural is in itself subject to political classification struggles. We therefore presents the findings of an inductive lexical analysis of all Irish Times, all Le Monde and all worker- or union-related articles published in almost all national media outlets during the mentioned referendum debates. This was made possible by the Alceste software package that allowed us to analyse very large corpuses of articles inductively. Our analysis reveals that socio-economic terms dominated policy debates in both countries. The findings question existing EU politicisation studies that were measuring the salience of different frame types by deductive analysis. enThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.European integrationPoliticizationEuro-skepticReferendumTrade unionCultural shiftWorking classAlcesteJournal Article56365667810.1111/bjir.123032018-02-05EACEA 2016-2391-001-001Ulysses Grant 2011-13ERC 725240https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ie/