Abstract
AbstractThe European Union (EU) has become increasingly visible and contested over the past decades. Several studies have shown that domestic pressure has made the EU's ‘electorally connected’ institutions more responsive. Yet, we still know little about how politicisation has affected the Union's non‐majoritarian institutions. We address this question by focusing on agenda‐setting and ask whether and how domestic politics influences the prioritisation of legislative proposals by the European Commission. We argue that the Commission, as both a policy‐seeker and a survival‐driven bureaucracy, will respond to domestic issue salience and Euroscepticism, at party, mass and electoral level, through targeted performance and through aggregate restraint. Building on new data on the prioritisation of legislative proposals under the ordinary legislative procedure (1999–2019), our analysis shows that the Commission's choice to prioritise is responsive to the salience of policy issues for Europe's citizens. By contrast, our evidence suggests that governing parties’ issue salience does not drive, and Euroscepticism does not constrain, the Commission's priority‐setting. Our findings contribute to the literature on multilevel politics, shedding new light on the strategic responses of non‐majoritarian institutions to the domestic politicisation of ‘Europe’.
Highlights
The European Union (EU) has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past decades
Under what conditions does the Commission react to public opinion, party politics and electoral pressure? What does it mean for the Commission to be ‘political’? To address these questions, we focus on the actor’s main role in EU policy-making: agenda-setting and the prioritisation of legislative proposals
This paper asked whether the Commission uses agenda-setting and legislative priorities in response to bottom-up political pressure
Summary
The European Union (EU) has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past decades. As Hooghe and Marks (2009) succinctly put it, the ‘permissive consensus’ of the first decades of European integration has given way to a ‘constraining dissensus’. This transformation is putting EU-level actors under considerable pressure. In the first decades of integration, the Commission was seen as the epitome of supranational technocracy: unelected, neutral, expertise-driven. Has the Commission, along with the political system it both serves and drives, come to attract more attention and contention; it has become self-proclaimed ‘political’ (see Kassim & Laffan 2019)
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