Geopolitical Crises and Consensus in the European Parliament: Initial Response to the War in Ukraine

Do members of the European Parliament (MEPs) experience the rally-around-the-flag effect? What explains the consensus and dissensus in the European Parliament (EP) when responding to geopolitical crises? Guided by these questions, we compare how MEPs debate the EU’s initial response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and annexation of Crimea in 2014. Considering that the EP is a multi-level and transnational context, we explore the patterns of consensus and dissensus on the EP level, on the EP party group level, and on the regional level of East versus West Europe. To this end, we use an original dataset of hand-coded speeches of MEPs in 12 EP debates. We identify three types of reasoning behind the MEPs’ speech acts in terms of the optimal EU response: power-driven, value-driven, and non-response. Each sentence from MEPs’ interventions is coded under one of the three categories. Consequently, we create a three-dimensional space where we can locate each individual MEP as well as aggregate MEP positions into a party group, regional, or the EP level. This allows to estimate geometric distances between MEPs’ positions and that of their party group, region, and the EP. Basing these estimations on speech acts makes a mixed-methods design possible. We first conduct regression analysis to explore what explains the variance in the distances and then compare patterns of consensus and dissensus across parties and regions qualitatively. We find evidence for the rally-around-the-flag effect, but also show that the effect is not uniform across party groups.