Dataset of Eurosceptic Party Positions in Portuguese and Spanish Parliamentary Debates during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The dataset comprises a systematic content analysis of parliamentary debates from Portugal and Spain, capturing political parties' stances toward the European Union during the Covid-19 pandemic. It encompasses speeches by MPs from the onset of each country's current government, 7 October 2019 in Portugal and 11 November 2019 in Spain, through April 2021, covering pre-pandemic and pandemic periods. Employing keyword-based searches, all parliamentary debates explicitly referencing the EU or its institutions were collected without sampling, resulting in 2,980 relevant paragraphs. Each paragraph was coded along two analytical dimensions: (1) evaluations of the EU, categorised as positive, ambivalent, or negative, and (2) overall party positions on European integration based on Bijsmans’ typology (2021) ranging from hard Euroscepticism, soft Euroscepticism, and Euroalternativism to full EU support. This detailed dataset facilitates comparative analyses of political rhetoric, elucidating shifts in party attitudes toward European integration in the context of the Covid-19 crisis. Supplementary Materials accompany the dataset, detailing the data collection and analysis procedures, providing an explanation of intercoder reliability assessments, and including a comprehensive description of the codebook.This research was funded by the Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos as part of the research project Study on the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Portugal (2020-2022).