A historic agreement? Debating the EU Recovery Plan in the German and Dutch plenaries

Abstract

This thesis will analyse whether national parties formulate credible alternatives to EU policies. According to the literature, national parties have the important function of making political choices and political alternatives visible. Nevertheless, much of the literature has failed to empirically investigate the extent to which national parties actually propose alternatives and how credible these alternatives are. Empirically investigating whether parties do propose credible alternatives is important, because only then they manage to introduce choice into EU politics. This is the gap that this thesis will address. In order to answer the research question, this thesis analyses how the EU's recovery plan for the Covid-19 pandemic has been debated in the German and Dutch national parliamentary debates and whether German and Dutch parties manage to present credible policy alternatives to the recovery plan. Focusing on two case studies allows for a sufficiently detailed discussion while also providing the benefit of comparison. The recovery plan has been chosen because it is identified as an important issue for voters in both countries. The coding-scheme from Karlsson and Persson (2018) is applied to code all statements made by Members of Parliament (MPs) about the recovery plan between April 2020 and December...