The rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU – Still an agenda-setter?

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 positioning vis-à-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.