European values against regional culture? Domestic discourses about EU action against democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland

Research on democratic backsliding as well as on EU counter-measures is growing rapidly, but only few studies investigate how EU action actually hits the ground in backsliding member states. With this paper, we build on our previous work on the domestic politics of EU action against democratic backsliding (Wonka et al. 2023) and seek to find out which arguments political parties use to justify or criticize backsliding reforms and how they try to mobilize for EU action or to delegitimize such interventions. Furthermore, we ask to what extent these domestic debates mirror or differ from corresponding debates at the European level (Wunsch and Chiru 2023). Arguments are treated as frames which actors strategically use to shape political debates and contestation (Wonka 2022). We distinguish three types of frames actors use in discussions on EU action against democratic backsliding: actors’ crisis diagnosis, the governance level appropriate for protecting EU member states’ democracy and frames capturing political values. We also code if frames are used by actors to support or oppose EU action against backsliding. Our analysis relies on an original dataset of about 1,500 news articles on democratic backsliding in Hungary (since 2010) and Poland (2015) including around 3,000 frames actors used during domestic debates.