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Explore Policy Trends

The EU Policy Agendas Project studies attention to policy issues in the European Union and its institutions. What issues feature on the EU agenda at specific points in time? How does the definition of issues change? What factors drive the formation of EU priorities? How does the EU address policy problems?

The EU Policy Agendas Project is an international collaboration between researchers interested in these questions. To analyse agenda-setting processes in the EU we develop systematic indicators of policy attention in its institutions. We compile large datasets of EU activities and conduct more in-depth analyses on speecific policy themes.

More information on our completed and running projects is available at www.policyagendas.eu.

Principal Investigator: Petya Alexandrova/ Sebastiaan Princen/ Marcello Carammia
Location: The United Kingdom/ The Netherlands/ Malta
Email: eupolicyagendas@gmail.com
Downloadable Data Series:  1
Time Span:  1975-2014
Total Observations:  48,321

EU

Featured Research:
Institutional Issue Proclivity in the EU

In an article forthcoming in the Journal of European Public Policy, Petya Alexandrova develops the notion of institutional issue proclivity. Macropolitical institutional venues deal with a large scope of policy areas but, due to cognitive and institutional constraints, process information serially. Therefore, they can be expected to demonstrate issue proclivity – long-term specialization in a narrow set of topics. In the European Union, the European Council and the... Read more

Agenda Responsiveness in the European Council

In an article in West European Politics, Petya Alexandrova, Anne Rasmussen and Dimiter Toshkov explores the synchronic and diachronic associations between what citizens in the EU consider to be the most important problems and the political attention devoted to these issues in the European Council from 2003 to 2014. The economic crisis after 2008 appears to have made the ranking of public concerns and the European Council agenda more alike. However, a detailed examination... Read more

Agenda Formation Perspective on the European Council

In an article in the Journal of Common Market Studies, Marcello Carammia, Sebastiaan Princen and Arco Timmermans review the key role of the European Council in the EU's institutional architecture. They argue that an analysis of agenda formation dynamics in the European Council may help us understand better how the body works and how its role has evolved over time. Building on theories of agenda setting, two ideal-typical modes of agenda formation are identified:... Read more

Political Attention and Issue Character

In an article in European Political Science Review, Petya Alexandrova uses the notion of issue character to explain attention allocation in the European Council. Policy issues compete for the attention of political actors, and the size of the agenda an issue can occupy is largely determined by the way in which it is defined. This logic constitutes a simple agenda-setting model in which factors related to the participants in the policy process and their context... Read more

National Interest vs the Common Good in the EU

In an article in the European Journal of Political Research, Petya Alexandrova and Arco Timmermans review the role of the rotating country Presidency (until 2010) for the agenda of the European Council. For the Presidency, preparing the agenda of European Council meetings involves a tension between loyalties. Existing research is divided over the question whether the Presidency pushes its domestic policy agenda on the EU level. Using empirical data on the Conclusions... Read more