The Rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU – Still an Informal Agenda-Setter?

Since the Treaty of Lisbon entered into force, the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU has been gradually overshadowed by the permanent president of the European Council and high-politics issues discussed therein. Yet, the decision-making process at the ministerial level represents a significant part of the EU politics. In this regard, this paper aims to address the importance of the Council of the EU by focusing on the policy agenda of its rotating chair. Institutional changes adopted in the past decades have greatly circumscribed the presidency’s agenda-shaping powers and, hereby, its room for manoeuvre, in turn, aiming to ensure policy continuity within the Council. Nevertheless, this paper claims that regardless of the institutional changes, the rotating presidency retains its element of diversity, which is reflected in variation of issue salience across different presidents. Based on the original hand-coded dataset of the rotating presidency programmes presented in 1997-2017, quantitative text analysis confirms the main presumptions raised by the punctuated equilibrium theory: whilst some policies, such as international affairs or macroeconomics are more ‘sticky’ on the agenda, the others (e.g. social policy, immigration, defence, etc.) exhibit significant attention shifts over time. Such agenda volatility is further examined by testing five factors: government ideology and its issue salience, public opinion, contributions to the EU budget and geographical positioning. Hereby, the study contributes to the existing state of the art by examining agenda-shaping powers of the rotating chair, while looking at both pre- and post-Lisbon periods.