Contrasting AI Narratives in Parliaments: The European Parliament and the German Bundestag

Discussions about the opportunities and risks associated with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into everyday life, business, politics, and societies are multifaceted and ongoing. Yet before assessing specific arguments for or against AI, it is crucial to examine how AI itself is talked about in political arenas. In particular, parliamentary debates provide insights into how legislators, who are responsible for both regulating and promoting AI technologies, frame and make sense of AI (Suter et al., 2025). Against this background, this paper asks: How are AI narratives constructed in the European Parliament and the German Bundestag, and how do they differ across these two parliamentary arenas? By focusing on parliamentary debates and publications, the paper addresses an important but yet underexplored site of meaning-making in AI governance, where political understanding of emerging technologies are articulated, contested, and linked to policy action. The study draws on the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), which conceptualizes narratives as policy-relevant meaning structures embedded in the broader policy process (Jones et al., 2023; Shanahan et al., 2011). Building on this framework, narratives are understood not as mere rhetoric, but as structured accounts through which policymakers interpret complex issues, attribute responsibility, and justify political action. Empirically, the analysis is based on a corpus of 18 parliamentary documents from the European Parliament covering the period from 2020 to 2024, and 25 parliamentary documents from the German Bundestag spanning the years 2018 to 2024. Across both cases, approximately 1,400 narratives were manually coded in line with the analytical categories of the NPF. Preliminary findings suggest that both parliaments predominantly rely on stories of control when addressing AI, indicating that while challenges are acknowledged, they are largely perceived as manageable through their respective policies. The settings in which AI is embedded vary considerably, ranging from specific policy fields such as health and medicine to broader global contexts, including recurring references to an international “AI race”. Notable differences emerge with regard to optimism about AI: stories of control are followed by stories of rising in the European Parliament and by stories of decline in the Bundestag signaling different beliefs about the technologies and their influence on our societies. By systematically comparing AI narratives across parliamentary arenas, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how legislators make sense of AI as a prerequisite for regulatory and promotional strategies. Moreover, it offers initial insights into narrative convergence and divergence within multi-level governance structures, highlighting potential sources of tension in the development and implementation of AI policy. References Jones, M. D., Smith-Walter, A., McBeth, M. K., & Shanahan, E. A. (2023). The Narrative Policy Framework. In Theories Of The Policy Process. Routledge. Shanahan, E. A., Jones, M. D., & McBeth, M. K. (2011). Policy Narratives and Policy Processes. Policy Studies Journal, 39(3), 535–561. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0072.2011.00420.x Suter, V., Ma, C., Pöhlmann, G., & Meckel, M. (2025). When Politicians Talk AI: Issue‐Frames in Parliamentary Debates Before and After ChatGPT. Policy & Internet, 17(3), e70010. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.70010