The European Council is the highest political body of the European Union and the main venue for setting the agenda on high politics. Using a new dataset of all content‐coded European Council Conclusions issued between 1975 and 2010, we analyze the policy agenda of the European Council and test hypotheses on agenda change and diversity over time. We find that the theory of punctuated equilibrium applies to the agenda of the European Council, which exhibits a degree of kurtosis similar to that found in policy agendas of other institutions located at the juncture between input and output of the policy process. Throughout the 36‐year period, agenda‐setting dynamics involved both small changes and major shifts but also more frequent medium‐sized negative changes than found elsewhere. Given capacity limits to the agenda, large expansions of attention to topics involved large cuts in attention. Cuts were more often medium in size in order to maintain some level of attention to the topics affected, even though issue disappearance from the European Council agenda has been frequent too. This relates to the functions of the European Council as venue for high politics, with expectations about issue attendance rising with increasing policy jurisdictions throughout the European integration process. Studying dynamics over time, we measured entropy to show how the agenda became more diverse but also displayed episodic concentration in an oscillating pattern. This can be accounted for by the nature of the European Council as a policy venue: increasing complexity of this institution pushed the members to produce a more diverse agenda, but capacity limits and the need to be responsive to incoming information led to concentration at specific time‐points.
This article introduces a novel dataset on the agenda of the European Council, the most powerful political body and core informal agenda setter of the EU. Using the approach taken by the Comparative Agendas Project, we trace political issue attention over a 38-year period (1975–2012). The insights in the agenda-setting processes within the European Council shed more light on the overall agenda of the EU and its temporal dynamics. This article explains the construction of the dataset, describes its features, and gives some examples of possible applications.
Using data on contributions to European Commission online consultations from 2001 to 2010, this article examines the level and character of engagement of foreign states in preparation of EU policy. The results show that regional differences in the overall participation of foreign actors are cancelled out when controlling for different demand‐ and supply‐side factors of regional representation. A country's volume of EU trade, level of development and degree of democracy all contribute to increasing participation. Moreover, variation in national economic and political structures helps explain the types of actors by which a country is represented.
The European Council is an institution which brings together the Heads of State, or Governments of the European Union (EU) Member States. For the Presidency, preparing the agenda of European Council meetings involves a tension between loyalties. Existing research is divided over the question whether the Presidency pushes its domestic policy agenda on the EU level. Using empirical data on the Conclusions of European Council meetings, and national executive speeches presented annually in five Member States, this article investigates the relationship between the policy agendas of the EU and its constituent countries. It tests whether national issue attention of the Presidency holder dominates the European Council agenda. The findings suggest that having the Presidency does not provide a de facto institutional advantage for agenda setting power for any of the countries in the sample. The analysis points out that normative and political constrains limit the leeway of presiding Member States to push for domestic agenda preferences in the European Council.
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