Rocking the Boat? Conflict in the European Parliament for the Two and Six Pack Negotiations

The housing bubble started growing in the USA during the 90s, busted during 2006, exploding in 2007 firstly in the US, later spreading in the European Scenario, translating into a public debt crisis that hit the European Union as a whole, highlighting the flaws of the European monetary union system and producing different geometries within the EU, potential divisive fractures between countries from the core and the periphery of the Union. These deep structural fallacies awoke and are continuously awaking disruptive sentiments both among the public and among political parties. The results of the last European Parliament (EP) election are only a signal of the spillover effect of the crisis onto the political system of the EU, providing a breeding ground for parties pushing anti-EU sentiments in its institutional framework. This paper aims at observing the behavior of national political parties represented in the EP, proposing a new way of approaching them trough a comparison of their speeches (analyzed using the Wordscore technique) and their voting behavior within the Parliament, in the occasion of the “two and the six pack negotiations”. Being part of a larger project, this work provides both a theoretical framework, together with preliminary results on the type of conflict enacted by political parties from a representative sample of EU member states within the EP (toward specific policies or toward the entire political system). The challenge of this work is to account for these potential conflicts in relationship to three sets of factors deriving from: the inter-institutional arrangements of the EU (consequently both its supranational and intergovernmental ethos); factors accounting for particular entailed national interests (e.g. the degree of exposure of a country to the economic crisis) and, potential party-based factors accounting for different alignments both toward the EU polity and policies.