MANY POLICIES, LITTLE TIME: REVISITING THE POWERS OF THE ROTATING PRESIDENCY OF THE COUNCIL OF THE EU

The rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union, once a key actor in the European decision-making process, was substantially weakened after the Treaty of Lisbon. Nonetheless, it maintains important competences, characterising the Presidency’s stance in the Council of the EU. Against this background, while focusing on one of the main responsibilities granted to the rotating chair – agenda control of the Council – this dissertation evaluates the extent to which the rotating Presidency is able to leave an imprint on the institution’s agenda, as well as the legislative outputs of the EU. In doing so, the research applies a widespread methodological approach, ranging from statistical analyses, quantitative text-analyses to qualitative comparative case studies. Throughout its four chapters, this dissertation addresses the key institutional assets possessed by the rotating Presidency: agenda-setting, agenda-structuring and agenda-exclusion powers, as presented by Tallberg (2003). Taking into consideration the lack of longitudinal analyses of rotating Presidency agendas, especially after the Treaty of Lisbon, this dissertation provides several contributions. First, it presents a novel, hand-coded dataset of 40 rotating Presidency programmes in 1997-2017. Throughout the dissertation, this dataset is employed as a proxy of their manifested agendas. By measuring issue salience across different rotating Presidency programmes, this research reveals attention shifts across different policies, and examines the main determinants (both at the national and supranational levels) influencing such punctuations. Furthermore, in order to measure the extent to which introducing issues on the agenda or changing their prioritisation can actually influence the legislative outputs, Chapter III explores the legislation adopted throughout the 20 years period under study. By employing a novel text analysis approach – a dynamic topic model – the study looks at the legislative outputs from a punctuated equilibrium perspective. In this regard, the research paves the way for future analyses of the EU legislation, especially aiming to establish a link between the input and output EU agendas, beyond the analysis of the Council Presidency. Finally, Chapter IV deals with often neglected negative face of power, i.e. agenda-exclusion. The chapter provides a step-by-step analysis of the legislative process to detect strategic delays and explores possible strategic explanations for such rotating Presidency behaviour in the post-Lisbon period. Overall, the dissertation shows that, despite the Treaty of Lisbon, the rotating Council Presidency has retained a degree of influence. This is expressed both in agenda management powers and chair’s leverage on the legislative outputs. Hereby, this thesis opens up trajectories for new research in the field of the rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU.