The Return of the Commission's Political Clout? An Assessment of the Juncker Commission Agenda-Setting Power

The literature on the EU has produced mixed appraisals of the Commission’s role, with some scholars emphasising the importance of the Commission’s entrepreneurship and others arguing for its irrelevance. While in recent years the thesis of the decline of the Commission has gained ground, particularly within the so-called new intergovernmentalist branch of the literature (Bickerton, Hodson and Puetter 2015), some studies still posit the prominence of the Commission (Bauer and Becker 2014; Nugent and Rhinard 2016). The aim of this paper is to give a valid contribution to the on-going debate by analysing the Juncker’s Commission agenda-setting capacity. The main argument of the paper builds on the idea that “objective success” in getting its preferences or goals accepted by others (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970) is indicative of the Commission’s influence in the EU governance. Using process tracing as method and the concept of “policy entrepreneur” (Kingdon 1984; 2003) as theoretical framework we will trace the state of play of the ten policy areas highlighted in Juncker’s political guidelines (2014) in order to answer one main empirical question: Has the Commission succeeded in pushing forward its pet proposals?