The Networks Behind the Delayed Adaptation: Discourse Network Analysis of the Czech DSA Debate

Two years into the full applicability of the Digital Services Act (DSA), the process of national adaptation has revealed considerable variation in interpretation, regulatory priorities, and political commitment (Mattioli, 2025). As of 2026, the Czech Republic remains among the few EU member states that have not yet aligned their national legislation with the DSA, despite earlier calls to implement the necessary measures ahead of the parliamentary elections in October 2025. It was also among the five member states that the European Commission flagged in May 2025 for failing to designate a Digital Services Coordinator and adopt national penalty rules. This case study illustrates how local discourse coalitions (Duygan et al. 2018) shape DSA enforcement, highlighting dynamics that are often invisible from the EU perspective, as emphasized by Börzel (2021). Building on a recent qualitative analysis of discourses and narratives in the DSA debate in the Czech Republic (Klabíková Rábová, Schneiderová, 2026), we follow up with quantitative Discourse Network Analysis (DNA). We addressed the following research question: How did discourse coalitions and their storylines evolve during the 2023–2025 DSA adaptation period in the Czech Republic, and which actors functioned as brokers transmitting frames across political and media arenas? Although the analysis focused on the DSA, keywords related to related digital regulations (DMA, AI Act, ChatControl) were also included to capture wider storylines mobilized across debates. We conducted systematic content coding of a corpus comprising legislative debates from the Chamber of Deputies, offline media (print, radio, television), and online news coverage. The data were analyzed using the Discourse Network Analyzer (DNA) software (Leifeld, 2017), with subsequent processing in R. Ties between actors were weighted to capture the intensity of relationships, including shared frames, repeated co-occurrences, and sustained alignment over time. This approach enabled the identification of discourse clusters, coalitions of aligned actors, and bridging actors across political and media arenas (Leifeld, 2020; Černý & Ocelík, 2020). Preliminary findings indicate a polarized landscape: while some discourse coalitions emphasize digital sovereignty (Falkner et al. 2024) and regulatory benefits, others highlight risks to users’ privacy and freedom of expression (Atzori 2024). Within some of these coalitions, we observed the systematic use of frames that resonate with known Russian disinformation narratives about EU censorship and loss of sovereignty (Tyushka 2022). Certain actors acted as bridges, linking otherwise separate discourse clusters, and thereby facilitating the diffusion of these frames into broader political and media debates, shaping pressure on national regulators. The Czech case illustrates that delayed enforcement is not solely a procedural issue and underscores that effective EU digital governance requires a more nuanced understanding of national discourse dynamics and their entanglement with hybrid information threats, resulting in tailored strategic communication (Macnamara 2025). Given that local executives may themselves reproduce opposing storylines, legitimizing EU policies may require proactive, two-way communication from the European Commission, performing procedural responsiveness (De Wilde & Rauh, 2019) and thereby supporting both public trust and legislators compliance.