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ABSTRACT
Does the Presidency of the Council of the European Union have the ability to direct the political attention of this body by emphasizing and de-emphasizing policy issues according to its own priorities? This study examines this question empirically by relying on a new dataset on the monthly meeting duration of Council working parties in different policy areas between 1995 and 2014. The results of variance component analyses show that a considerable part of the over-time variation in the relative amount of political attention devoted to a policy area is systematically related to different Presidency periods. While not negating the constraints imposed on the Presidency by inherited agendas, programming and co-ordination requirements with other actors, the findings are consistent with the view that the Presidency has substantial scope for agenda-setting by determining what issues are being discussed, when they are being discussed and how much time is devoted for their discussion.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2011 Biennial Conference of the European Studies Association in Boston, a 2011 meeting of the European Legislative Politics Research Group in The Hague, the 2012 Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago, and the Department of Public Policy and Management at the University of Konstanz in 2015. I am grateful for the constructive criticism and comments received from participants at these events and from three anonymous JEPP referees.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Frank M. Häge is a lecturer in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Limerick. Address for correspondence: Frank M. Häge, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Limerick, Ireland.
Notes
1. Thus, the concept of scheduling power is related to but narrower than Tallberg’s (Citation2003) concept of agenda-shaping power. Amongst Tallberg's (Citation2003) three ways in which Presidencies can shape the Council's agenda, scheduling power coincides to a large extent with Tallberg's ‘agenda-structuring’. However, the concept of scheduling power also includes the complete omission of issues from the agenda, which is part of Tallberg's ‘agenda exclusion’, and the inclusion of new issues, which is part of Tallberg's ‘agenda-setting’.
2. Art. 237 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) (formerly Art. 204 of the Treaty establishing the European Community [TEC]).
3. Art. 3.2 of the Council's Rules of Procedure in Official Journal (2009) Council Decision of 1 December 2009 adopting the Council's Rules of Procedure (2009/937/EU). L325/35, 11 December.
4. Art. 3.2 of the Council's Rules of Procedure in Official Journal (2009) Council Decision of 1 December 2009 adopting the Council's Rules of Procedure (2009/937/EU). L325/35, 11 December.
5. Tallberg (Citation2010: 252) provides further supporting examples. In contrast, Kleine (Citation2013) suggests that the Presidency keeps proposals intentionally off the agenda whose content it would strongly like to shape in a certain direction, in order to be able to make credible compromise proposals and fulfil its role as an efficient facilitator of negotiations. In this view, the Presidency deliberately uses its scheduling power to alleviate fears by other member states that it might use its proposal-making power to their disadvantage.
6. Where not indicated otherwise, the following description is based on two interviews with central meeting co-ordinators of different Presidency countries on 19 July 2012.
7. In particular, the short causal chain rules out alternative explanations that might affect alternative dependent variables based on measures of collective Council decisions (e.g., laws or policy statements), which are not under direct and immediate control of the Presidency, but depend on the actions of other actors. Of course, characteristics of the dossier under consideration (e.g., the complexity of the proposal, level of conflict or deadlines) affect scheduling decisions as well, but given that it is difficult to prevent the Presidency from ‘dragging its feet’ on issues that it does not want to pursue or from scheduling additional meetings on issues it deems important, they are at most mediating factors that may weaken (if the dossier is not a priority) or amplify (if the dossier is a priority) the relationship between priorities and attention.
8. The different areas are: General Affairs; Foreign Affairs; Development; Budget; Economic and Financial Affairs; Justice and Home Affairs; Agriculture; Fisheries; Internal Market; Telecommunications; Energy; Research; Employment and Social Policy; Transport; Environment; Health and Consumer Policy; Education and Culture.
9. The month of August was dropped for all years and policy areas because of a negligible number of meetings owing to the holiday season.
10. National manifesto data suffer from the same problems of comparability outlined in the text as Presidency programmes (e.g., Gemenis Citation2012). In addition, Party manifestos for national elections (Warntjen Citation2007) or national executive speeches outlining government priorities (Alexandrova and Timmermans Citation2013) present agendas for national policy-making, not priorities for what the government would like to achieve as part of its half-year Council Presidency term at the EU level. Measures based on those sources might suffer less from endogeneity problems. Yet, they are at best indirect proxies for the concept to be measured and, as such, are likely to be affected by systematic measurement error. Finally, speeches tend to be more selective than manifestos. Indeed, Presidency presentations of their work programmes to the European Parliament do not mention certain major topics at all (Warntjen Citation2007). Therefore, the discussion in the text is focused on Presidency work programmes as the source most likely to produce valid priority data.
11. As explained above, the month of August has been dropped because of the lack of any significant meeting activity during that month.
12. See Table A1 in the Online Appendix for the complete numerical estimation results from the mixed effects regressions.
