Breaking with economic orthodoxy? Framing the transformation of EU economic governance in parliaments during crises

The public debates on the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis and the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic were different. The Eurozone crisis was framed as an asymmetric and endogenous crisis caused by the misconduct of a few national governments accumulating unsustainably high debt levels. Fear of moral hazard led to an intergovernmental crisis response of austerity measures and structural reforms. The COVID-19 economic crisis was framed as exogenous and more symmetric. For the first time, the European Union’s (EU) recovery plan NextGenerationEU (NGEU) allowed centralized borrowing to finance recovery spending and reforms in the member states, a previously insurmountable red line for many. The focus moved to public spending and capacity building to increase future resilience to crises including a green and digital transition. Against this background, we ask: To what extent do we see a paradigm shift in parliamentary debates on EU economic governance, and who drives potential transformations? We conduct a Discourse Network Analysis (DNA) on parliamentary debates on the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis and the COVID-19 economic recovery efforts in the national parliaments of Austria, Germany, France and Greece and in the European Parliament. This allows us to capture different economic traditions and crisis contexts in a multilevel setting. DNA is ideal to investigate how debate coalitions form around (dominant) actors and ideas by capturing patterns of (dis-)agreement. We focus on key macroeconomic ideologies (Neoliberalism, Ordoliberalism, Monetarism, Keynesianism) and on different responsibility frames (moral hazard, solidarity, risk-sharing vs. risk-reduction, intergovernmentalism vs. supranationalism). Rather than a sudden break with existing economic ideas and goals, we find an incremental transformation of economic instruments although we identify different ideological, geographical and government-opposition dynamics in different institutional settings.