Conflicts Averses or Aversion to Conflicts? Rapporteurs' Speeches during legislative debates in the EP

Pennetreau, Damien;Laloux, Thomas
(2019) Sovereignties in Contention:Nations, Regions and Citizens in Europe — Location: Madrid (20.June.2019)

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This paper aims to examine how rapporteurs defend the compromises they negotiated with the Council and 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, with the rise of trilogue negotiations, debates in the EP plenary mostly concern files which have already been negotiated. Such debates can thus hardly influence the content of the legislations. The presentations made therein by the rapporteurs of trilogues’s compromises constitute therefore the only public justification of the EU adopted legislative acts. By examining the discursive strategies and types of arguments rapporteurs rely on, 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. The analysis first relies on 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. 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). Results show a depoliticisation trend in rapporteurs’ speeches although differentiated according to the different political group.
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Pennetreau, D., & Laloux, T. (2019). Conflicts Averses or Aversion to Conflicts? Rapporteurs’ Speeches during legislative debates in the EP. Sovereignties in Contention:Nations, Regions and Citizens in Europe, Madrid. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/213154