Government-Opposition Dynamics of IO Scapegoating: Evidence from European National Parliamentary Debates, 1997-2020

While major international organizations (IOs) face increasing contestation and blame attribution, we know surprisingly little about the partisan dynamics that drive IO scapegoating. Building on a synthesis of literatures on party politics and IOs, we argue that government membership is a crucial factor providing both incentives and constraints for partisan strategies towards IOs. Existing theories pose competing expectations: (1) governing parties might scapegoat IOs and shift blame for negative outcomes in their country; (2) opposition parties might attack the "executive empowerment" where governing parties shift executive decisions to the supranational level; (3) a large literature documents how it is the radical parties, typical opposition, rather than those in the executive, that drive IO contestation. This paper examines which of these competing dynamics prevails, and under what conditions, thus analyzing the micro-level processes of IO politicization and scapegoating. We focus on both general patterns of government-opposition differences and on within-party dynamics based on their entrance/exit from government. For that purpose, we use a novel machine-translated corpus of parliamentary speeches that spans 11 European countries and more than 20 years. We employ a complex, human-validated approach combining Generative AI, BERT-based LLMs, and bag-of-words techniques to measure a latent scapegoating score using item response theory.