Pro and Anti EU Attitudes in Legislative Debates Over Fiscal Compact and ESM: A Comparative Textual Data Analysis of Parliamentary Speeches in France, Germany and Italy

Debates in legislative assemblies are receiving growing attention in political science, typically to estimate policy positions of political actors. The analysis of legislative speeches has been extensively used both to estimate the position of national parties and their members in domestic debates (Slapin & Proksch 2008; Lowe & Benoit 2012), and to investigate the dimensions of conflict in the European Parliament (Proksch & Slapin 2010). However, these analyses are generally focused on a single legislative assembly, and the comparability of their results is therefore limited. In this sense, the ratification process of the Fiscal Compact and of the Treaty establishing the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) represents a unique opportunity for a comparative analysis. In most of the EU countries these initiatives were submitted to a parliamentary ratification procedure. This means that the same topics were discussed and voted on the same basis by different national parliaments. Therefore, the analysis of the parliamentary debates allows to compare how national parties react to EU politics and how their members position themselves on a common European-related issue. In order to carry on our comparison, we examine the legislative debates over the Fiscal Compact and the ESM in three of the most representative countries in the EU — France, Germany and Italy — by using word counts from legislative speeches. This comparison allows us to explore how political actors in different national party systems respond to the same crucial questions connected to European integration, providing a comparative overview of their relative policy positions on a common pro- or anti-EU dimension.