"Digi Left-Right": Digital Policy Space Folded into the Broad Left–Right Dimension in the European Parliament

Digital transformation is one of the main avenues of current social change and, thus, a phenomenon to be addressed by politics. The prediction of political actors' positions on this specific preference space is a salient topic for political scientists and citizens. This paper examines whether digital politics in the European Parliament is permeable to the traditional Left–Right ideological axis and whether ideological alignment predicts optimism or pessimism toward digital transformation. Drawing on a combination of parliamentary speech embeddings, roll-call–based ideal point estimations, and sentiment analysis, I conduct a preliminary test of two hypotheses. Embedding regression results provide preliminary support for the first hypothesis: the signification of the concept of digital is dependent on Left-Right speaker positioning, with left-leaning MEPs emphasizing welfare and collective themes and right-leaning MEPs emphasizing market and enterprise terms. No consistent ideological structuring is observed for artificial intelligence. I do not find support for differences of sentiment towards digital transformation issues across political groups, suggesting that optimism or pessimism toward digital transformation is not determined by Left–Right positioning. These findings imply that the Left-Right spectrum retains structuring power in this emerging policy domain, while no systematic differences in affection towards digital transformation are observed between political groups.