Legislative Debates on the Implementation of EU-Directives

The issue of European politics has become more important in political competition in many EU member states in recent years. EU-membership in general and directives coming from the EU in particular also often have important implications for the content of national legislation. The paper will therefore examine parliamentary debates around the implementation of directives adopted under the co-decision-procedure in Brussels. To do so, it will focus most importantly on analyzing if, and how government and opposition parties use particularly confrontative strategies when debating these implementations in the plenary. After all, debates on the implementation of directives offer an opportunity for opposition parties to attack the government on its agreement to EU-legislation in the legislative process on the EU level. These debates, in theory, should give a possibility for the opposition to voice concerns and critiques with regard to very precise policies eventually affecting members of the national electorate. To see if the implementation of directives is characterized by exceptionally adverse debates in the context of increased politisation of EU, these debates will firstly be analyzed over a considerable time span (1990 – 2019). This will allow the paper to see whether changes in the importance of European politics in political competition have co-occurred with changes in the debates of implementation, or whether the dynamics have not changed. Secondly, the findings from the implementation debates will be compared to non-directive related debates on EU-affairs in the parliaments. The cases under investigation will be the UK, France, and Germany. The paper will employ quantitative text analysis, sentiment analysis in particular, to measure opinion from the legislative debate. It will draw most importantly on three unique corpora of legislative speeches for the three cases under investigation (substantially extended versions of data provided in the ParlSpeech-dataset) and a new and detailed dataset on legal acts adopted by the EU and member states in Brussels. This data set allows to sort and group directives by policy fields concerned according to the EUROVOC and other descriptors provided by the EUR-Lex data base. The paper makes a contribution to our understanding of the legislative process in national parliaments in the European Union as well as the debate on the EU and its activities in these national parliaments more generally.