Convergence of European security and defense preferences? A quantitative text analysis of strategy papers, 1994–2018
| Author | Konstantin Gavras,Matthias Mader,Harald Schoen |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14651165221103026 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Convergence of European
security and defense
preferences? A quantitative
text analysis of strategy
papers, 1994–2018
Konstantin Gavras
Department of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim,
Mannheim, Germany
Matthias Mader
Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of
Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
Harald Schoen
Department of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim,
Mannheim, Germany
Abstract
Since the end of the Cold War, the EU aims to advance to a relevant and autonomous
actor in international politics—especially concerning security and defense politics.
Scholars interested in whether the EU member states actually converge in their security
and defense preferences often analyze strategy papers qualitatively, focusing on selected
countries at specific points in time. In this article, we propose a dictionary approach for
analyzing the development of security and defense preferences within the EU over the
last three decades using quantitative text analysis. We make use of 163 strategy papers,
published by all EU member states and the EU itself since 1994. The findings show that
EU member states react similarly to international events, but do not converge substan-
tially in their preferences. Furthermore, there is no substantial convergence to the
Corresponding author:
Konstantin Gavras, Department of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, A5 6, Room A-342, 68131
Mannheim, Germany.
Email: kgavras@mail.uni-mannheim.de
Article
European Union Politics
2022, Vol. 23(4) 662–679
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165221103026
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
position of the EU itself. We finally discuss usefulness and validity of quantitative text
analysis in comparative research more broadly.
Keywords
Security and defense politics, European integration, quantitative text analysis, preference
convergence, strategy papers
Introduction
The convergence of the European Union (EU) member states’foreign and security pre-
ferences is widely considered to be important for the EU to become an autonomous actor
in international politics. Correspondingly, scholars have been interested in whether the
member states have converged on these issues in the last decades. An important data
source to study this question are national strategy papers. Such analysis is usually con-
ducted using qualitative methods, focusing on a few countries and/or specific points in
time (e.g. de France and Witney, 2013; Giegerich, 2006; Meyer, 2005; Pannier and
Schmitt, 2014). While the qualitative analysis of strategy papers—and other official
texts on the topic—has produced valuable insights, it has proven less useful in addressing
large-scale comparative questions, such as the development of security and defense pre-
ferences within the EU. While it is in theory possible to apply qualitative methodology to
such questions, the sheer amount of work necessary to implement it has so far discour-
aged the implementation.
1
In this article, we employ quantitative text analysis (QTA) tools—which can easily
handle large amounts of text, although they have other limitations—to answer these
large-scale comparative questions. Our contribution thus joins a small group of studies
that use key strategic documents to make foreign and security policy preferences, or
even cultures, measurable with the help of QTA methods (Becker, 2021; Becker and
Malesky, 2017).
2
We use a dictionary approach to examine whether security and
defense preferences of Eastern and Western European countries and of the EU itself con-
verge. While we mainly explore the usefulness of this QTA method rather than providing
definitive answers, we believe that the empirical findings—however tentative they may
be—are of substantive interest as well, as they address unresolved questions in current
research on security and defense politics (Barbé and Morillas, 2019; Pirani, 2016).
Starting from the assumption that strategy papers represent the national preferences in
security and defense politics at a given point in time, we can use these documents to
compare preferences across time and space.
3
To operationalize convergence, we draw
on prior research and distinguish three analytical dimensions of comparison.
‘Sigma-convergence‘(Heichel et al., 2005), i.e. decreasing coefficients of variance, is
studied on two relevant dimensions. First, similarity of preference shifts examines
whether states exhibit (increasingly) uniform changes in preferences in reaction to prom-
inent international events. We hence utilize the fact that such events create the necessity
for a conscious response of the states under consideration here (where the decision to stay
the course could be one such response). Such parallel changes would not indicate a
Gavras et al. 663
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