National stereotypes in European Parliament Debates: Warmth, Competence, and Political Dynamics in a Transnational Setting

Across Europe, national stereotypes have long circulated in satire, journalism, and domestic politics. While existing scholarship has examined such stereotypes in art, media and national political discourse, little is known about how they surface at the European Union (EU) level. Among EU institutions, the European Parliament (EP) is a puzzling case because it combines institutional features that simultaneously discourage and facilitate national stereotyping. This paper investigates how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) employ national stereotypes in plenary debates between 2009 and 2019. Drawing on the ParlEE dataset, and a new codebook for qualitative content analysis, we identify and map all instances of national stereotyping in EP debates. Theoretically, we integrate insights from social psychology with research on MEPs’ behaviour to analyse how in-group identification and ideological orientation shape the public articulation of national stereotypes in plenary. We find that, although uncommon overall, stereotypes are systematically present in EP debates and most frequently take a paternalistic form. The study contributes the first dictionary of national stereotypes in EU parliamentary debates and sheds light on the social and political dynamics behind them.