The rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU – Still an agenda-setter?

Abstract

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.

Can we do what we say we will do? Issue salience, government effectiveness, and the legislative efficiency of Council Presidencies

“…We use a hand-coded dataset of 40 rotating Presidency programmes issued between 1997-2017 (Vaznonytė, 2020). The coding considers only policy-related text-based content in the programme documents, which is then split into quasi-sentences, following the EUPAP approach, and each quasi-sentence is assigned to one of 21 EUPAP main policy areas (Alexandrova et al., 2015).…”

“…The coding considers only policy-related text-based content in the programme documents, which is then split into quasi-sentences, following the EUPAP approach, and each quasi-sentence is assigned to one of 21 EUPAP main policy areas (Alexandrova et al., 2015). 7 The inter-coder reliability score (Cohen’s Kappa), based on a random sample of 400 quasi-sentences from 40 Presidency programmes, is 0.8 (Vaznonytė, 2020).…”

“…To account for differences in programme length, the salience measure is constructed as the percentage of all quasi-sentences referencing a specific policy area in a given Presidency programme (Vaznonytė, 2020). Figure 1 plots the measure as it evolves over time.…”

A window of opportunity? The relevance of the rotating European Union presidency in the public eye

“…Indeed, it is overwhelmingly focused on evaluating the performances of single presidencies (e.g. Bilčík, 2017;Fuchs, 2020;Karolewski et al, 2015;Schout, 2017), in some cases in a more comparative manner (Batory and Puetter, 2013;Schout and Vanhoonacker, 2006;Vaznonytė, 2020). Some contributions develop general frameworks for evaluating the success of a presidency (Häge, 2017;Smeets and Vennix, 2014;Toneva-Metodieva, 2020;Vandecasteele and Bossuyt, 2014) or embed the presidency in integration theories (Coman, 2020;Puetter, 2014).…”