Debating "Democratic Backsliding" in the European Parliament: A Discourse Analytical Approach

Democratic backsliding and concerns around the rule of law in some member states are arguably the most contentious issues the EU has faced over the past years. After a period of internal accommodation, the EU institutions and mainstream political groups in the European Parliament (EP) have recently taken a more confrontational approach towards backsliding countries. Recent studies have improved our understanding of the structural factors enabling backsliding in the EU, but we still know little about the ideational context within which political and institutional actors make decisions about backsliding. To address this gap, this paper looks at how democratic backsliding is debated in the European Parliament, the EU’s most politicized institution. Using a discourse analytical approach based on hand coding of over 63 EP plenary debates from 2011 to the present, we provide a fine-grained account of the nature of deliberation on democratic backsliding, the arguments and justifications used by different political and institutional actors, and the discursive correlates of recent changes towards a more activist and seemingly more instrumental approach to sanctioning democratic backsliding. This research not only improves our understanding of the evolving dynamics of democratic backsliding in Europe, but also provides further insights on the extent to which the EU is a functionalist union or a union of values