Who Gets the Blame? National Parliamentary Debates in the European Semester

The European Semester has institutionally strengthened the European Commission’s oversight over EU member states’ national economic policies. This has sparked scholarly interest in whether member states follow the European Commission’s largely non-legally binding Country-Specific Recommendations (CSRs). Yet little is known about how national policymakers actually debate EU-recommended reforms in their parliaments. This article addresses this gap by applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to the ParlLawSpeech corpus, a new dataset that links annotated parliamentary speeches with legislative acts. Our analysis centers on disputed labor market and pension reforms, which increase labor market commodification and which had been the target of a prior CSR. Using quantitative text analysis, we systematically examine how blame is assigned during parliamentary debates. Three findings stand out: (1) pro-European parties are less inclined than Eurosceptic parliamentarians to invoke the EU when discussing commodifying reforms; (2) governing parties frequently assume responsibility for such reforms; and (3) when incumbents do shift blame, they target prior governments rather than the EU. Overall, these results suggest that parliamentary blame attribution remains primarily domestically oriented. Non-binding CSRs rarely shape debates directly, while governing parties often prefer to claim ownership of unpopular reforms rather than portraying them as imposed by Brussels.