Who cares about climate change? Analysing 20 years of EU Member States preferences with topic modeling

Abstract

In the context of the past political, social, and most recent economic developments, energy policy is the topic with the highest priority in the EU. Besides, being one of the most critical political issues today, energy policy is also inherently tied to climate change.

However, do EU Member States (MS) really prefer climate change as it might appear? What about other closely related yet often competing policy priorities of the energy security, or the Energy Union, the project launched in 2015? My scholarly caution has been raised about climate policy goals of the EU and their feasibility with other priorities, which aims at building a secure, competitive, and affordable energy market. I investigated the policy preferences of the EU MS, performing a topic modeling analysis of more than twenty years of plenary debates in the European Parliament (EP).

For this extensive data inquiry, I took advantage of an unprecedentedly large dataset of more than two hundred thousand of MEP's contributions during plenary debates addressing energy issues. This unsupervised learning method enables me to identify organisation of energy policy debate which I presented at the conference in Prague.