Grandstanding under the Spotlight: Unveiling Elites Crisis Communication in the Council of the European Union

How have EU crises shaped European elites’ crisis communication? Recent literature talks about emergency politics, a mode of governance that becomes prevalent during crises. In this line, executive leaders justify their actions as necessary responses to exceptional and urgent threats. This article introduces an empirical text analysis of emergency politics in the Council of the European Union through the lens of emergency language. The Council, despite being the most powerful legislative body within the EU, has often been criticised for its lack of transparency, more importantly during crises. To explore emergency politics in action, this study focuses on debates in the Economic and Financial Affairs Council configuration during the Euro crisis, relying on public videos of Debates in the Council of the European Union - DICEU data from 2011-2016, which are analysed with the novel method of `a la carte embedding regression. This tailored approach allows us to focus on specific contexts of emergency politics and capture when and how national ministers resort to emergency language in Council debates. The results show in the Euro crisis, economic contexts such as the EU country’s bailout program and high bond yields prompted a shift towards emergency language. These findings have implications for understanding how EU decision-making bodies communicate during crises and the transparency of such institutions.