No Need for Justification? Analysis of Rapporteurs’ Speeches in the European Parliament
(2019) 2019 EUSA International Biennial Conference — Location: Denver (9.May.2019)
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- This paper aims to examine how rapporteurs defend, during plenary sessions of the European Parliament (EP), the compromises they negotiated with the Council. Subsequently, it also aims at explaining variations in arguments rapporteurs use. Within the EU legislative procedure, the EP plenary is the main forum for justifying policy choices vis-à-vis the public. Yet, nowadays with the rise of trilogue negotiations, debates in the EP plenary mostly concern files which have already been negotiated with the Council. As a result, such debates can hardly influence the content of the legislative acts. The presentations made therein by the rapporteurs of trilogues’s compromises constitute therefore the only public justification of the EU adopted legislative acts. The paper thus examines the discursive strategies and the types of arguments rapporteurs rely on when they defend –and try to build support for– the agreement they reached during trilogue negotiations. It focuses more particularly on analysing how these arguments do vary and explaining why. By doing so, we contributes to fill a gap in (European) legislative studies. Thus far, EP rapporteurs’ discourses have not been investigated, despite the key role they play during the legislative process. This paper also contributes to the debate regarding the democratic legitimacy of the European Union's legislative decision-making. The public justification of the policy choices made therein is indeed a key dimension of its democratic legitimacy. Practically, the analysis is based on two-step approach. First, using the interpretive approach of discursive institutionalism, 50 speeches out of the sample are qualitatively analysed. This step aims at identifying what types of arguments are used by rapporteurs and what words corresponds to the different frames. Then, the second step applies this inductively built dictionary to the remaining 200 articles of the sample through a dictionary analysis computed with R (software). The method enables to combine the precision of qualitative analysis coupled with the encompassing and systematic nature of qualitative text analysis. Results show a depoliticisation trend in rapporteurs’ speeches. They emphasize teamwork with other institutions and the balanced nature of reached compromises. They do so by relying on several different type of frames. However, European political group display different behaviour. Some adopt more confrontational style, leading to another result. The type of frames rapporteur rely on is thus partly explained by the political group they belong to. On the theoretical point of view, our results show that, since rapporteur try to avoid debates, their speeches do not contribute to the ideal of ideas of deliberative democracy.
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Pennetreau, D., & Laloux, T. (2019). No Need for Justification? Analysis of Rapporteurs’ Speeches in the European Parliament. 2019 EUSA International Biennial Conference, Denver. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/213155