Politicisation “at the bottom”: how national parliaments make sense of change in EU Economic Governance

The EU response to the economic consequences of the Great Lockdown has rekindled longstanding contention on different political and economic integration projects stemming from EU Member States (EUMS). Heads of governments made their divergences clear in the framework of intergovernmental summits, often with reference to the constraints imposed by their domestic parliaments. Parliamentary debates over the Eurozone crisis and bail-outs have been well studied. Yet, besides this constraining dimension, we know little about how parliaments’ understanding and framing of EU economic governance evolved in the years leading to the pandemic response. This paper contributes to our knowledge of these dynamics by comparatively analysing the annual debates on the government budget in four EUMS (France, Germany, Netherlands, and Portugal) from 2015 to 2021, through a combination of (quantitative) unsupervised topic modelling and (qualitative) political discourse analysis. We argue that the politicisation of economic governance during the pandemic’s ‘fast-burning crisis’ was shaped by how political agents in domestic arenas understood and politicised EU economic governance – and the role of politics and government in it – in the years prior to it. Our findings indicate that cross-country divergence was largely shaped by substantial differences in what ‘matters’ to parliamentarians when debating economic policy. Our contribution thus provides in-depth empirical bases for a new light on the determinants of continuity and change in EU economic governance.