National interest versus the common good: The Presidency in European Council agenda setting

Abstract

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.

The standing president of the European Council: intergovernmental or supranational leadership?

“…Others, however, did not confirm such a bias; according to their findings, most decisions reflected the collective interests of the Council as a whole (see e.g. Alexandrova and Timmermans 2013). Some observers saw the room for presidencies to pursue national interests shrinking, particularly since the reforms of the Lisbon Treaty (Leconte 2012).…”

“…Elgström 2003;Beach and Mazzucelli 2008a;Alexandrova and Timmermans 2013). These studies questioned whether the presidents 'mattered' in reaching decisions, that is, whether they successfully set the agenda, mediated diverging national interests, and forged the necessary compromises.…”

The scheduling power of the EU Council Presidency

“…6 Despite the rather more favourable conditions for the Presidency to exercise scheduling power, little research has examined the extent to which the Presidency is able to emphasise or de-emphasise the attention devoted to different policy issues. Alexandrova and Timmermans (2013) were particularly successful in advancing the negotiations. Of particular relevance for the current study, his research demonstrates that the scheduling of additional meetings was one of the mechanisms relied upon by Presidencies to make progress on the legislative files.…”

Civil Society and the Governance of Water Services: German Political Parties’ Reactions to Right2Water

“…While the political process concerning the proposal and adoption of the Concessions Directive is fascinating, and reveals numerous insights into EU politics and the growing importance of civil society actors [12,[18][19][20], we adopted a different analytical perspective in this study. Our research revolved around the argument that Right2Water was important for bringing the issue of water and sanitation services onto the political agenda of the EU member states [19,21,22]. Therefore, we investigated Right2Water from the agenda-setting perspective [23].…”