Who Says It’s Urgent? A Discursive Analysis of “Emergency” Frames in the European Parliament

Drawing on a structured database of EP debates (Mochtak, 2025), this paper investigates how MEPs frame emergencies in their discourses. It asks the following questions : RQ1. How is emergency framed within the European Parliament? This research question is deployed in three subquestions analysed through descriptive quantitative methods: RQ1.1. Which public policy domains are associated with emergency frames in the EP ? RQ1.2. Who deploys emergency frames in the EP ? RQ.1.3. When are these frames used? A second research question, focusing on a particular policy domain\event identified as relevant or puzzling through the quantiative analysis (to be selected), asks : RQ2. How do MEPs use emergency frames to justify political action? This second part of the analysis (not developed further in this early version of the paper) has an exploratory purpose and aims to investigate qualitatively several related issues, including: whose interests are represented through emergency frames; what are the object of emergency (an emergency of what?); the attribution of responsibility (who or what is to blame, and whether causes are exogenous or endogenous); and the range of proposed responses (which solutions are put forward by MEPs to address the emergency). Drawing on literature on political framing, the paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how MEPs use emergency frames to prioritise certain issues or values, delineate adversaries (within or outside the EU), and legitimise policy options. Moreover, the paper seeks to adress some gaps in the existing literature. While previous research has examined how other EU institutions frame crises and emergencies (de Boer, Carroll, Kuipers, Nespeca, & Yesilkagit, 2026; Kyriazi, 2026), we focus specifically on the EP. In addition, earlier studies on framing in the EP have adopted an issue-specific perspective, concentrating on particular policy areas such as climate policy (Kinski & Ripoll Servent, 2022) or democracy (Coman, 2026). By contrast, we adopt a transversal approach, analysing emergency framing across policy domains in parliamentary debates.

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Defacqz, S., Reymond, E., & Laloux, T. (2026, June 17). Who Says It’s Urgent? A Discursive Analysis of “Emergency” Frames in the European Parliament. Council for European Studies, 32nd International Conference of Europeanists, University College Dublin, Ireland. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-021-00155-9