From Summitry to EU Government: An Agenda Formation Perspective on the European Council

Abstract

While some observers have claimed that the European Council has become the key institution in European Union politics, others have argued that the Council's role has remained relatively stable over time. In this article, we argue that an analysis of agenda formation dynamics in the European Council may help us understand better how the European Council works and how its role has evolved over time. Building on theories of agenda-setting, we identify two ideal-typical modes of agenda formation: selective targeting and routine monitoring. Based on a comprehensive dataset of coded European Council Conclusions in the period 1975-2011, we show that the substantive content of the European Council agenda shows little change over time. However, in terms of agenda formation dynamics, we find a marked shift toward routine monitoring of issues. This supports the claim that the European Council is developing into the EU's de facto government.* The authors are grateful to three anonymous reviewers for useful comments and suggestions.

Researching European Union Agencies: What Have We Learnt (and Where Do We Go from Here)?

“…Inter alia the financial crisis triggered several intergovernmental initiatives which led many observers to draw the conclusion that the Council, and in particular the European Council, had become the key executive, or de facto government, of the EU, to the detriment of the Commission (Bickerton et al, 2014). Also a broader agenda and more frequent meetings in the European Council have led to the same conclusion (Carammia et al, 2016). Our findings are more consistent with the observations reported by Bauer and Becker (2014) and Nugent and Rhinard (2016) on the persistent key role of the Commission.…”

What’s the talk in Brussels? Leveraging daily news coverage to measure issue attention in the European Union

“…Actor-centred indicators approach issue saliency from the viewpoint of aspiring agenda influencers or institutionalized agenda setters. This is the approach adopted by researchers who have constructed measures of issue prevalence from European Council, Council of the European Union and European Commission files (Alexandrova, 2017; Alexandrova et al., 2016, 2014; Carammia et al., 2016; Häge, 2016; Osnabrügge, 2015), European Parliament speeches (Greene and Cross, 2017) or, at the domestic level, from debates in the legislature (Rauh, 2014; Wonka, 2016) or items in party manifestos (Veen, 2011). This approach has the advantage of being both analytically and empirically tractable, in addition to having relevance for various strands of research on EU politics.…”

¿Estados Unidos de Europa? Mapeo y diseño de constituciones para Europa

“…Fabbrini 2013S. Fabbrini , 2015a, with the European Council playing a central role (Carammia, Princen, and Timmermans 2016;Puetter 2012;Wessels 2012). That is why the EU decision-making process has been described as "executive federalism" (Habermas 2012, 337), "authoritarian managerialism" (Joerges 2015, 218) or "executive dominance" (Curtin 2014).…”