(iPoster) Parliamentary Discourse on West European Security Policy

• In Event: Poster Sessions: International Security II & Normative Political Theory
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: International Security II

Abstract

This study examines national parliamentary speeches from Western Europe to analyze legislators’ attitudes toward international threat perception and national security policy. Using multilingual parliamentary corpora, including but not limited to ParlSpeech V2, ParlaMint, and ParlLawSpeech, and filtering debates through keyword-based identification of foreign-policy–related content, the project leverages advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) for text classification of relevance, tone, sentiment, and thematic focus. By directly analyzing policymakers’ discourse rather than policy outputs alone, the study addresses gaps in existing measures of foreign policy preferences and contributes to ongoing debates on studying national security policy. The resulting labeled data enable cross-national and temporal comparisons of how individual legislators, parties, and coalitions articulate views on foreign countries and global security issues. Substantively, the findings offer insights into the evolution of Western European security policies and their implications for transatlantic relations.

Author

• Ahra Wu, Princeton University