Institutional issue proclivity in the EU: the European Council vs the Commission

ABSTRACT

Macropolitical institutional venues deal with a large scope of policy areas but, due to cognitive and institutional constraints, process information serially. Therefore, they can be expected to demonstrate issue proclivity – long-term specialization in a narrow set of topics. In the European Union (EU), the European Council and the Commission form a dual executive. Their distinctively different functional roles imply differences in institutional issue proclivity, which are empirically tested on 12 years of output agendas data. The European Council exhibits issue proclivity towards soft law domains, whereas the Commission towards exclusive EU competencies, the common market and flanking regulatory affairs. The European Council’s remit is rather protected but the Commission is more vulnerable. As the fields of business and energy demonstrate, the European Council can temporally become more active in Commission proclivity domains in the context of large-scale crises and political salience of big projects.

KEYWORDS:

• European Commission
• European Council
• European Union
• institutional issue proclivity
• policy agenda

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sebastiaan Princen, Markus Haverland, Amie Kreppel and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Petya Alexandrova is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Political Science at Leibniz University Hannover.

Notes

1. It needs to be acknowledged, though, that the threat of bureaucratic drift is always present, especially in an environment of competition across departments, ministries, committees or similar thematically specialized units.

2. Accompanied by the President of the Commission and, since the Treaty of Lisbon, also by the semi-permanent President of the European Council.

3. Though called Presidency Conclusions before the Lisbon Treaty, they have always been produced on behalf of the Heads of State or Government.

4. Separate Directorates-General (DG) publish annual activity reports but these are very detailed and technical and the focus is on each DG rather than the College.

5. The coding was made with the help of pairs of student assistants who were initially carefully trained. All disagreements were discussed and final decisions on hard cases were taken by the project supervisor.

6. The PreLex website ceased to exist from 2015 and all information was transferred to the EurLex system (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/).

7. Descriptive figures of the attention to topics in each institution are available in the Online Appendix.

8. The measure of foreign affairs includes EU foreign policy, as well as all specific topics in relation to third countries or the international arena (e.g., elections in Afghanistan or UN Climate Conferences).

9. It was adopted in 2009 and aimed to be integrated into national law by 2011.