Analyzing Sentiments towards the European Union in Slovak Parliamentary Speeches (1994–2023)

The era of digitalisation unveiled ample possibilities for political science. In recent years, the ever-increasing online availability of political text records and computational power allowed for big data analysis of political speeches. Yet, this trend has so far been very limited in the context of Slovakia. This paper introduces a novel dataset of over 420 000 speeches from the National Council of the Slovak Republic (1994-2023) that has been pre-processed for quantitative text analysis. In the second step, the paper assesses the sentiments of the Slovak politicians towards the European Union. It is shown that the EU-related sentiments peaked around the time of the accession and experienced a steady decline since then. Ever since the 2010 euro crisis, the sentiments were in their historic lows and keep declining. Lastly, I run structural topic models to unveil which topics are associated with positive and negative sentiments towards the EU.