National governments are accused of being evasive and opportunistic in their presentation of European integration, thereby exacerbating the EU’s crisis of legitimacy. Yet empirical evidence of how governments present Europe at home is limited. This project  provides the first comparative, quantitative study of how governments in the EU present Europe to their domestic audiences. Inspired by Fenno’s 1978 classic, I call this their home style.

Through this work, I show that whilst EU scapegoating is in fact rare, governments are extensive credit claimers that are reluctant to share credit with the EU for issues citizens care about. I also show that whilst governments in fact speak at length about the EU, they do so in a language that is technocratic and hard for citizens to understand. I conclude that whilst the stereotypical image of governments as evasive, opportunistic blame shifters is overblown, the way they present the EU at home still poses deep problems for democratic accountability in Europe’s multilevel system of governance. 

To what extent, and in what ways, are IOs debated and discussed in national and international legislatures? In this project I use the growing infrastructure of  machine readible parliamentary transcripts to  create original data on mentions of European integration (EUParlspeech) and IOs more broadly (IOParlspeech). I use this data to explore how attitudes to EU enlargement have ebbed and flowed over time (both in the European parliament, and national legislatures) how different political parties debate international institutions, and how parliamentarians outside the UK reacted to Brexit,  with the conclusion that populist challengers significantly moderated the Euroscepticism in their Brexit statements after the vote. 

In this project I study how individual identities and descriptive characteristics shape international politics, using identity as both dependent and independent variable. I consider whether the descriptive characteristics of ministers and ambassadors shape the way they negotiate, focusing on the negotiation rhetoric of women in the Council of the EU. I also look at causal factors shaping cosmpolitian forms of identification. For instance, I consider whether the Europeanization of elite club football, as evidenced  by the transformation of the UEFA Champions League, contributes to a shared sense of European belonging.