The (de)Politicizing Attitudes of National Political Parties on European Integration

This paper will present the results of a research building on a comparative design and innovative method. It aims for a better understanding of the differentiated (de)politicization of European integration in the years of Eurozone crisis. Most previous studies in this area study the explanations of politicisation, intending to answer the question: “Why may (de)politicisation of European integration happen?”. We propose to go a step further in the process and ask the following question: “How may (de)politicisation of European integration happen?” Building on previous work (Versailles and Van Ingelgom, 2017), our analysis will focus on national political parties as intermediate factors of (de)politicisation. On the one hand, we will analyse the depoliticizing strategies of government parties faced with the difficult context of economic crisis in Europe. In this case, we define a “depoliticizing attitude” as the discursive strategy to present the political decisions as the only possible choice, without any alternative. On the other hand, we will analyse the reaction of opposition parties; do they have a politicizing attitude, trying to increase the scope of the political debate, or rather choose to act as reasonable agents? In this case, we define a “politicizing attitude” as the discursive strategy to claim in favour of alternatives to the decisions taken by the ruling actors. We will conduct discourse analysis thanks to quantitative approaches of parties’ discourses in five European countries: Belgium, France, Ireland, UK and the Netherlands. The main innovative feature of this research is twofold. First, we use quantitative text analysis to evaluate the degree and pattern of politicization, second we propose a new specific measure for (de)politicizing attitude of political actors. Our main result is the elaboration of a typology of politicising and depoliticising attitudes in the political parties’ discourses.