Archive - Conference Papers

A crucial aspect of political agenda setting is that issues compete for the attention of policy makers. Issue conflict is usually structured in cleavages, which vary across polities, institutions and time. An increasing amount of studies on the EU find various lines of conflict in the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament and the European Commission but the European Council, the key agenda setter and informal decision maker of the EU, hardly features in such analyses. This paper examines the 'hidden' dimensions of issue competition in the European Council. Applying multidimensional scaling to European Council Conclusions from 1975 to 2011, two lines of issue competition are identified: high vs. low politics and external/ less integrated vs. internal/ more integrated politics. The two-dimensional configuration is relatively stable over time, with some variety in the prominence of the second dimension. High politics issues are always prominent, no matter whether they have been internalised and integrated or not. Low politics themes with medium level of integration/ internalisation are the least competitive and likely to be considered as substitutes. They have a chance to gain more attention in times when need for further integration or a European response to a problem is involved.