The Eurozone Crisis and National Parliaments: Representative Roles and Communicative Involvement

The paper approaches the Eurozone crisis as an opportunity for a stronger communicative involvement of national parliaments in European governance. In this context, the paper explores links between structures of argumentative justification and party political polarization in debates on the Eurozone crisis. The question addressed is in how far we observe generalizable patterns across very different cases and legislatures. Empirically, the paper presents an assessment of data on argumentative claims from four European legislatures (the Austrian Nationalrat, French Assemblee Nationale, German Bundestag and UK House of Commons). This data demonstrates that aside from some unsurprising differences in the structure of debate in the four countries, we can actually observe typical patterns of contestation across legislatures that differ along various levels of argumentative discourse. Debates on the utility, normative principles and legitimacy of Eurozone crisis management can be identified across all four cases, each resulting in characteristic patterns of party political polarization