Narrating European Territorial Governance: A Quantitative Analysis of Plenary Debates in the European Parliament

Territorial governance is a relatively new concept that has been gaining ground in European politics in recent years. By emphasizing the territorial dimension of policymaking, European territorial governance aims to promote policymaking with actors from different sectors and across different levels of governance, while being sensitive to the specificities of changing territorial contexts. This paper analyses the discursive evolution of territorial governance in the European Union. We assume that the territoriality of governance is a politically sensitive issue in European multilevel governance which resonates in debates linked to normative concepts such as subsidiarity, democracy, and European sovereignty. More specifically, we argue that the discourse on territorial governance relies on contending narratives structured around these concepts. Tracing the narratives of territorial governance in European politics over time, and understanding how they are linked to normative concepts, therefore, allows us to reconstruct the contested status of territoriality in European political thinking. The empirical part of the paper is based on a new large-n text corpus that collects all plenary debates in the European Parliament (EP) over the last 25 years. The EP includes speakers from all major European parties and member states and is important for understanding European narratives of territoriality. The paper presents data linking MEPs’ plenary interventions on health, migration, and digital policy to regional, member state and European concepts of territorial governance. The data provide a deep dive into the discursive structure of debates in the EP and show how concepts of territoriality change over time and across policy areas, and how they are linked to notions of subsidiarity, democracy and sovereignty. Finally, the paper highlights the use of large text corpora and narrative analysis to enrich knowledge about multilevel governance and European politics. It complements qualitative analyses and provides rich ground for the derivation of theory-driven hypotheses.