Although agenda-setting dynamics in the European Union are a well-studied phenomenon, there is a gap in the literature between the current focus on issue attention dynamics (a policy input) and the impact attention dynamics have on policy outputs. This study examines how the rotating Council Presidency’s stated policy goals for their term in office affect EU decision-making efficiency. We show that the salience the rotating chair of the Council attaches to a given policy area affects legislative efficiency in that policy area. We also demonstrate how this effect is conditioned on government effectiveness in the state of the Presidency in question, and is independent of Commission policy priorities. This suggests that the Presidency can drive EU policy outputs and push for its priorities when it holds the chair, but that its ability to do so is contingent on the domestic organisation and effectiveness of the state.

What role does the rotating Council Presidency maintain a decade after Lisbon? This article argues that, regardless of institutional changes, the rotating Presidency still shapes the Council agenda to a large extent. Based on an original hand-coded dataset of rotating Presidency programmes between 1997 and 2017, I show that some policies are ‘stickier’ on the Council agenda, while the others exhibit significant changes in salience over time. Since the magnitude of these shifts varies from Presidency to Presidency, the analysis focuses on domestic political factors and the country positioning vis-à-vis the European Union to determine their relationship with agenda volatility. By means of a panel model, the examination demonstrates that the government issue salience can best explain the levels of issue salience in the Presidency programmes.

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