Who cares about climate change? Analysing 20 years of European Union's preferences in energy security policy with topic modelling
Abstract
In the context of the past political, social, and most recent economic and geopolitical developments, energy policy has been the topic with the highest priority in the European Union (EU). Besides being one of the most critical political issues, energy policy is also inherently tied to climate change and sustainability.
However, do members of the European Parliament (EP, MEPs) really prefer climate policies over other closely related yet often competing energy security policy priorities? Thus, as energy and climate policy is perceived as a susceptible area for EU member states, following their national specificities and needs, my scholarly caution has been raised about the climate policy goals of the EP and their feasibility with other priorities, which aims at building a secure, competitive, and affordable energy market. In this paper, I investigated the policy preferences of MEPs, performing a topic modelling analysis of more than twenty years of plenary debates in the EP.
For this extensive data inquiry, I took advantage of an unprecedentedly large dataset of more than 34 500 energy-related speeches (consisting of more than 4 million words) addressed by MEPs during plenary debates. I intend to cast light on the underlying features of text reflecting two decades of energy policy debates in the EP and encode its structure into an estimation of categories.
Applying an unsupervised machine learning technique enabled me to identify the temporal changes in the organisation of energy and climate policy debates. Clearly, it showed evident regional cleavages to be of main "conflict" line structuring probability of addressing climate policy (or sustainability in general), i.e., offering to be of higher importance for MEPs from the area of Northwest Europe.
In contrast, MEPs from Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltics are among the most frequent ones mentioning the security of supply issues. Against this outcome, this article also asks what lessons can be learnt from this for the EP's future role in adopting a more ambitious climate policy (as an effect of the sixth IPCC Report or Russia's invasion of Ukraine) and its implementation.
Besides, methodologically, this research also further elaborates on the ongoing debate about probabilistic modelling and illustrates the potential and need for computational methods that enable the analysis of large datasets and complement conventional social science methods.