Working Paper. Moderating Criticism of the EU While in Government? New Evidence on The Party Politics of European Integration in Czech Parliamentary Debates

While existing research has identified an “opposition deficit” in EU salience, where governing parties discuss the EU more frequently than opposition parties, little is known about how government status shapes the content of these debates. This paper expands the literature by analyzing how parties adjust their discursive strategies toward the EU when in government or opposition in the unique and least-likely case of Czechia. I employ computational stance detection on a dataset of all Czech parliamentary speeches to focus on within-party changes in pro-EU and anti-EU stances between stints in the government and in the opposition. The results suggest that all parties (which enter government at some point) adopt significantly more pro-EU stances while in government than while in opposition. The difference is strongest for the parties that are most critical while in opposition (ODS and ANO). The results show that government membership plays a key role in structuring partisan discourse about the EU, and the dynamic nature of the stance differences suggests that short-term strategic adaptation (rather than longer-term socialization into pro-EU stances) is at play.