The political initiatives of the Rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU – from empirical facts to expert evaluation

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a novel instrument for expert evaluation of political initiatives of the Rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union. This evaluation will create a possibility for assessment of the leadership performers of the Rotating Presidency as a key mechanism for implementation of the EU integration policies. In pursuance of this goal, the article is structured around the three topics. First, the functions of the rotating presidency and the place of the political initiatives among them. Second, the development of an instrument for registration and mediation of the facts that are rich in content. Third, presenting results from the specific, conditional quality measuring of the performance of the Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the EU during the first half of 2018 under the undertaken political initiatives and their total expert evaluation.

KEYWORDS:

• Rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU
• political initiative
• EU policy-making
• evaluation
• Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the EU 2018

Acknowledgements

Great thanks to Professor Georgi Dimitrov for the very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper and foremost for the inspiration of this research adventure.

Notes

1 The term ‘expertise’ is used with a dual meaning. First, the very construction of the questionnaire, with which we approach the empirical facts from the various sources, as well as the values ascribed to the varieties of the answers to the questions, are a work of a research team, in which participate Dr. Toneva-Metodieva, a member of the Ministry of the Presidency Political Office, and Assoc. Prof. Simeonov, Work Groups Head at the Ministry of Finance. Second, the expertise of the evaluation is guaranteed by the strict following of the methodological standards, providing reliability and representatives, and also a strict methodological control on the procedures leading to the final quality result from the integral index application.

2 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/publications/white-paper-future-europe_en

3 The article is based on the results from the research of Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, European studies department, Sofia University. http://jeanmonnetexcellence.bg/en/activities/research/

4 Trying to evaluate objectively the French Presidency in 2000, Schout and Vanhoonacher appropriately claim that: ‘Judging presidencies is easy, evaluating them is not. Evaluations are rare and often superficial’ (Schout & Vanhoonacher, 2006).

5 The two authors who make a review of the available literature on the RPCEU summarize that four main issues are subject of active academic debate – whether the RPCEU can exert influence at all; what are the definitions of ‘influence’ and ‘success’, what is the definition of ‘interest’, a methodological problem of the objective evaluation due to the causal complexity of the RPCEU.

6 See Karolewski et al. (2015); Keulen and Pijpers (2005); Král et al. (2009).

7 The other two aspects are – returning the presidency to the capital of the presiding country and ascribing a more significant European role to the Prime Minister of the presiding country.

8 For example, a clear Bulgarian political priority is the stimulation of the EU membership of the Western Balkans, which corresponds with European priorities. This priority was formulated as European Perspective and Connectivity of the Western Balkans – https://eu2018bg.bg/bg/60

9 For instance, in the evaluation of the Czech Presidency (2009) the authors emphasize on the external factors that have impact on it – the change of the EC, the elections to the EP and the influence of the French President – but it doesn’t become clear how the impact of the abovementioned external factors has been operationalized (Kral et al., 2009).

10 This questionnaire is our registration form for the quantitative content analysis. For each political initiative, the team searched information and filled in separate registration form.

11 Including methodology for work assessment of the European Commission under the annual reports for the progress of Bulgaria in the process of preparation for EU membership within the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence (jeanmonnetexcellence.bg/2017/02/14/сравнително-изследване-на-процеса-на/).

12 The political initiatives – type, participants, timing – are described in the Report of the Bulgarian Rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU(Отчет на Програмата на Република България за Председателството на Съвета на Европейския съюз).

13 These scores are in fact degrees in conditional ordinal scale. The introduced numeric values reflect the logical connections between the respective degrees, forms and stages, but also the proportions in which the empirical indicators themselves correspond to each other in terms of content.