Emergency Politics in the European Union: Analyzing Urgency, Unity, and Discretion in EU Policymaking

The successive and overlapping crises faced by the EU over the last years have led researchers to identify a new modus operandi in EU policymaking, one of permanent emergency politics (Kreuder-Sonnen & White, 2022) or crisisification (Rhinard, 2019). However, there is no scientific consensus on whether EU emergency politics impede or foster democratic deliberation. While some scholars argue that crises are ‘exploited’ to increase political and public support and to amplify executive authority (e.g., Boin et al., 2009; Kreuder-Sonnen & White, 2022), Truchlewski, Schelkle and Ganderson (2021) demonstrate that crises may also stimulate deliberation and compromise. This paper addresses this puzzle by analysing whether and under which circumstances policymaking in the EU becomes more efficient, unified, and discretionary when facing crises. I test these expectations by leveraging the newly constructed ParlLawSpeech dataset (forthcoming), which extends the ParlSpeech infrastructure by linking over 6,900 bills and over 6,600 laws with over 590,000 transcribed and translated (using Google Translate) speeches from the European Parliament (EP) between 1999 and 2019. First, I estimate the extent to which speeches by the commission emphasize a state of emergency using latent semantic scaling techniques (similar to Rauh, 2022). As a next step, by exploiting the links between parliamentary debate and legislative documents, I analyse whether and under which conditions a perceived crisis threat increases the efficiency of lawmaking (in terms of success and duration), parliamentary unity (based on roll call votes and the polarization of debates as measured through speech texts), and bureaucratic discretion (based on measures brought forward by Franchino et al., 2023, and Vannoni et al., 2021). To help identifying the causal mechanisms associated with the relationship (i.e., exploitation of crisis frames vs. political responses to actual crises), I also consider the emergency emphasis in speeches by MPs, especially those of less supportive party groups (in terms of roll call voting). I furthermore test potential moderations by policy area as signaled through the affiliation of the commissioner(s) contributing to the parliamentary debate. This research’s findings will provide important new insights not only into the crisis modes of governance in the EU and beyond, but also into how parliamentary emergency politics contributes to more structural changes in EU governance. References: Boin, 't Hart, & McConnell (2009). Crisis exploitation: political and policy impacts of framing contests. Journal of European public policy. Franchino, Migliorati, Pagano, & Vignoli (2023). Concepts and measures of bureaucratic constraints in European Union laws from hand‐coding to machine‐learning. Regulation & Governance. Kreuder-Sonnen, & White (2022). Europe and the transnational politics of emergency. Journal of European Public Policy. Rauh (2022). Supranational emergency politics? What executives’ public crisis communication may tell us. Journal of European Public Policy. Rhinard (2019). The crisisification of policy‐making in the European Union. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies. Truchlewski, Schelkle, & Ganderson (2021). Buying time for democracies? European Union emergency politics in the time of COVID-19. West European Politics. Vannoni, Ash, & Morelli (2021). Measuring discretion and delegation in legislative texts: methods and application to US states. Political Analysis.