Political Elites and Polarization: Understanding Political Discourse in the European Parliament During Turbulent Times

Abstract In liberal democracies, both experts and laypeople are observing an increase in polarized public discussions. The rise of social networks and various crises are linked to this political fragmentation. What role do political elites play in this? Our study examines European elite politicians at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war. Using a dataset from Twitter/X and an unsupervised, pre-trained, transformer-based topic model, we analyze the discourse of all members of the European Parliament (MEP) and the European Commission. Our findings show that the attention of political elites to the conflict is immediate and brief. Sentiment analysis confirms the polarized nature of discussions related to the crisis. Notably, male politicians and those on the ideological extremes tend to express more negative sentiments than females and politicians of the political center. Additionally, a crisis event like the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war tends to deepen this emotional divide. Our research adds to existing literature on polarized narratives by focusing on polarization dynamics driven by diverse political elites.