Sovereignism as a Product of Crises? Comparing the Emergence of Sovereigntist Claims in Parties during the Migration and Corona Crises

Sovereignism has gained considerable importance in recent years as an argument and justification by political actors for certain realignments of their policy goals and political programs. At the same time, however, sovereignism remains a diffuse concept which lacks empirical scrutiny so far. This paper strives to explore if and how sovereigntist claims are used by parties and to what extent parties particularly invoke such appeals in times of crisis. Based on a multi-dimensional approach, we propose conceptualizing sovereignism in its political, economic, cultural, and international dimension. We expect diversity of sovereigntist claims in content and in the intensity of usage. Beyond that, however, we are interested in assigning even more precisely whether certain parties prefer certain sovereigntist claims particularly strongly and in which crisis contexts this occurs. Thus: Are such claims limited to the “usual suspects” of populist or extremist right and left parties? Or do mainstream parties equally use a sovereigntist narratives or framing? And how far do occurrence, patterns and content dimension resemble in party families across countries? As we assume that sovereignism is expected to take different forms in EU member states that are differently affected by socioeconomic, cultural, and political tensions, we follow a most different system design to shed light on these potential differences and evaluate how the types of sovereignism vary (or not) across parties. In doing so, this study compares a creditor country, Germany, and a debtor country, Spain. This paper relies on a large textual corpus composed of party manifestos and parliamentary speeches of all parliamentary parties in Germany and Spain between 2010 and 2021. On the basis of this corpus, we detect the use of sovereigntist claims a) during different crisis situations and b) in parties covering the ideological breadth in c) two countries that considerably contrast in their crisis response and their background conditions.