This article examines how national parties and their members position them- selves in European Parliament (EP) speeches. We apply a new computer-based content analysis technique, Wordfish, to estimate legislator and national party positions in the European Parliament using the word counts in speeches. We test three hypotheses of position-taking in the European Parliament: a left-right ideology hypothesis, a pro/anti-Europe hypothesis, and a national politics hy- pothesis. Surprisingly, and in contrast to studies of roll call votes, we do not find evidence that national party positions estimated from legislators’ speeches reflect the parties’ overall left-right ideology. Instead, these positions reflect stances towards EU integration and national redistributive characteristics. We test the robustness of our results in a threefold manner. First, we take ad- vantage of the multilingual environment of the European Parliament and show that the estimated positions are robust to the choice of translation (English, French, and German). Second, we use independent measures of national party positions from analyses of roll call votes and two expert surveys to investigate the speech positions. Finally, we apply a range of statistical models to account for measurement error of the independent variables and the hierarchical struc- ture of the data. Our robust findings suggest that the entire corpus of EP speeches reflects partisan divisions over EU integration and national divisions rather than left-right politics.
