Cultural Stereotypes in the European Parliament: Warmth, Competence, and Political Dynamics in a Transnational Setting

Cultural stereotypes have existed in Europe for centuries, emerging as people started to associate national, regional, or religious groups with specific attributes (Connelly 2014; Leerssen 2018). In the context of European integration and increased redistribution in the European Union (EU), such stereotypes have gained renewed significance. Over the past decade, they have featured prominently in political and media debates on EU decision-making: the euro crisis divided the EU into Northern ‘saints’ and Southern ‘sinners’ (Matthijs & McNamara 2015), while the Covid-19 pandemic contrasted the ‘frugal four’ (Austria, Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden) with the spendthrift South (Bialasiewicz 2020). Yet beyond these cases, systematic evidence on how stereotypes circulate in EU public discourse remains limited. How do politicians within EU institutions employ national, regional, or religious stereotypes in their public communication? This paper investigates the distribution of cultural stereotypes in plenary debates of the European Parliament (EP) between 2009 and 2019. Drawing on the ParlEE dataset (Sylvester et al. 2023), we apply qualitative content analysis to link speakers to positions in which they attribute traits to EU cultural groups. Theoretically, we combine Social Identity Theory (SIT) and the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) to explain how in-group identification, perceived status hierarchies, and intergroup competition shape patterns of stereotyping. Our findings show that stereotypes, though uncommon overall, are systematically present in EP discourse, most often in paternalistic form. The paper contributes a first dictionary of cultural stereotypes in EU political debates and advances understanding of how cultural stereotyping shapes political dynamics in a transnational setting.