The rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU – Still an agenda-setter?
| Author | Austė Vaznonytė |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116520916557 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The rotating Presidency
of the Council of
the EU – Still an
agenda-setter?
Aust _
e Vaznonyt_
e
Department of Public Governance and Management, Ghent
University, Ghent, Belgium
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 position-
ing vis-a
`-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.
Keywords
Agenda-setting, Council of the European Union, issue salience, rotating Presidency
Introduction
The roles of the rotating Council Presidency are often framed in terms of the
agenda-setting powers the chair holds. The recent institutional changes, including
Corresponding author:
Aust_
e Vaznonyt_
e, Department of Public Governance and Management, Ghent University, Henleykaai 84,
Campus Mercator G, 9000 Ghent, Belgium.
Email: auste.vaznonyte@ugent.be
European Union Politics
2020, Vol. 21(3) 497–518
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116520916557
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the establishment of the Trio Presidency, the High Representative for Foreign
Affairs and Security Policy, as well as the Eurogroup President, limited the
powers of the rotating chair in respective policy areas, which added up to the
transfer of the European Council chairmanship to the appointed President
(Bunse and Klein, 2012; Dinan, 2013; Puetter, 2014). Although these changes
lowered the influence of individual Presidencies, rotating chairs remain responsible
for the legislative activity (Batory and Puetter, 2013). Furthermore, H€
age (2017)
and Warntjen (2013) have argued that even in the post-Lisbon period countries are
able to leave a national imprint in the Council’s work. Building on this literature,
this article analyses whether the rotating Presidency agendas exhibit changes in
salience across issue areas.
The agenda of each Presidency is inevitably affected by multiple factors, such as
the legislative dossiers inherited from its predecessors, the agendas of the Trio
Presidency, the European Council and the European Commission’s own priorities
and the pressure exerted by external events. Nevertheless, when drafting its
agenda, the rotating chair reassesses the importance of each dossier (General
Secretariat, 2015), which provides the member state with the opportunity to shuffle
and perhaps advance proposals in line with its own national priorities. Therefore, I
expect the shifts across rotating Presidency agendas to be influenced by the salience
of issues for the government holding the rotating Presidency, as well as by country-
specific policy priorities and partisan political preferences. Hence, this article
focuses on the extent to which national factors and country position vis-a
`-vis
the European Union (EU) shape the Presidency’s agenda, irrespective of suprana-
tional and exogenous factors.
Testing these expectations, the study makes use of an original, hand-coded
dataset of 40 rotating Presidency programmes released between 1997 and 2017.
The resulting panel dataset, once augmented with information on domestic factors
of interest, is analysed by means of panel model estimations. In the article, I pre-
sent the estimates from a general linear model adapted for panel data, following
Krauser et al. (2019). A dynamic panel model and a classical fixed-effects model
are reported in the Online appendix as a robustness check. The study assesses the
extent to which some features of presiding countries (such as the government
salience or political orientations, and the long-term interests of a given country)
find their way into the rotating Presidency programmes. I show that among those,
especially government issue salience contributes to determining which fields are
prioritised by the Council Presidencies – notwithstanding the relevance of supra-
national factors. These results are stable across all estimators, suggesting that the
main findings are robust.
This study contributes to the literature on the EU agendas and paves the way
for future research, in particular, to focus on both national and supranational
factors influencing the agendas not only of the Presidency but also other EU
institutions. The results presented in this article suggest that even though the
attention dedicated to national priorities of the government holding the rotating
chair has possibly decreased since the Treaty of Lisbon, domestic considerations
498 European Union Politics 21(3)
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