Policy Punctuations and Issue Diversity on the European Council Agenda

Abstract

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.

Stability and change in international policy-making: A punctuated equilibrium approach

“…First, the predictive power of PET is broader than previously thought. With few exceptions (Alexandrova et al 2012;Goertz 2003), previous scholarship in this tradition has focused on the national level, identifying punctuations in the agendas of national and local government. This article represents the first comparative application of PET to IO policy-making and demonstrates that policy punctuations are prominent in global governance.…”

“…This dynamic of punctuated equilibria has been established in several studies on American public policy (Baumgartner and Jones 1993;Jones and Baumgartner 2005), comparative public policy ), and more recently EU public policy (Alexandrova et al 2012). In addition, punctuated equilibria have been observed in a range of different policy fields, including public health policy (Baumgartner and Jones 1993), environmental policy (Repetto 2006), and welfare policy (Jensen 2009).…”

Upsetting the agenda: the clout of external focusing events in the European Council

“…Although the Council configuration is focused on a single policy domain, the institution brings together the Heads of State and Government to discuss a much broader set of issues. Even if international affairs take up a large portion of the agenda (Wessels 2008;Alexandrova et al 2012), other urgent topics cannot be ignored. Moreover, the FAC is supposed to meet once every month and in fact convenes even more often (Gomez and Peterson 2001), whereas European Council summits are rarer.…”

Policyminer: From Oysters to Pearls

“…Detailed interpretation of attention intonation for all 21 high-level policy areas is out of scope of this paper and needs comprehensive separate study. To consider the relative attention allocation of all high-level policy areas, new type of analysis method called "Attention Allocation Analysis" is used by previous methods [14,3,1]. The result of this analysis is a stacked-area graph in which the total area of the graph represents the government total attention allocation and the region for each policy represents the proportion of the government's attention for that policy.…”

“…Having transformed the raw legislative document into time-series model of data, now, we could apply several data analysis algorithms including Search Analysis, Trend Analysis, Attention Allocation Analysis, Entropy Analysis, Correlation Analysis, Causality Analysis and Clustering Analysis that are defined and implemented in previous methods [11,3,1,18,14]. For each of these analysing algorithms, we define a variable point in our Template pattern.…”