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

Levan Kakhishvili and Alina Jasmin Felder-Stindt
Additional contact information
Levan Kakhishvili: Center for Comparative and International Studies (CIS), ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Alina Jasmin Felder-Stindt: Department of Political and Social Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

Politics and Governance, 2026, vol. 14

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: consensus; European Parliament; European politics; MEPs; Russian invasion of Ukraine (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/11074 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:poango:v14:y:2026:a:11074

DOI: 10.17645/pag.11074

Access Statistics for this article

Politics and Governance is currently edited by Carolina Correia

More articles in Politics and Governance from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().