Political Conflict around Digital Regulation in the European Parliament

Following the adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, the European Union has steadily expanded its online regulatory competencies. However, as digital governance is a new policy domain, it is not self-evident how the political choices involved map on the established political divides in the European Parliament. This paper examines how European Parliamentarians, and their Party Groups position themselves on this issue and which conflict lines emerge, using Nominate Scaling to analyse the relevant roll-call votes in the 9th European Parliament. In this period, five flagship EU digital policy Acts are considered. The findings are further substantiated by qualitative case studies of the Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). Despite the novelty of the presented challenges, this research finds that digital policy is incorporated into the existing structure of European Parliament politics, with a dominant ‘Grand-Coalition’ between the EPP and S&D groups and typical coherency levels. The underlying dimensions are best explained by a one-dimensional model, which captures a variety of explanatory valuables. Surprisingly, however, motivated by freedom of speech concerns, the far-right ECR and ID MEP’s take a ‘moderate’ position on this dimension, where they vote with their centre and left-wing colleagues. Political conflict is thereby primarily driven by the free market-oriented Renew and EPP groups.