Communicating EU Consumer Rights to Citizens: A Comparison of Tools, Strategies and Messages

Effective communication with citizens is of primary importance for institutions such as the European Union. Research into EU communication has found that EU informative documents also perform a promotional function which can be viewed as part of a consensus-building strategy (cf. Magistro 2007; Giordano / Piga 2018; Silletti 2018; Seracini 2020). The present study contributes to research into how EU institutions communicate with citizens by focusing specifically on the dissemination of knowledge concerning EU law in the area of consumer protection, where legislation has been popularised on the EU website in the form of different text-types and communication tools. This research takes a comparative approach and aims to establish how these popularised texts differ from one another in terms of their communicative function. The analysis is carried out with a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis approach (Partington 2004) on three corpora containing a set of different text-types popularising EU consumer protection legislation and takes linguistic and visual elements into consideration. Results reveal that the different text-types complement one another by fulfilling different communicative functions. The study also puts forward the idea that a process of ‘redirection’ is carried out, where knowledge is not only communicated, but is also provided as a practical tool for the lay public.