Paper Titles & Abstracts

The influence of the rotating Council Presidency on EU decision-making has been the subject of much academic debate in the past decades. While some authors have claimed that holding the Presidency is of limited relevance for the influence of a Member State in the EU, others have convincingly shown that the chair does exert additional influence on decision-making. Although the Lisbon Treaty dramatically changed the institutional setting for external EU policies, recent research shows that the Presidency continues to play a role in external EU policies. However, a systematic analysis of (combinations of) conditions that increase Presidency influence is still lacking in the literature. The proposed paper outlines the analytical framework for a comparison of three Council Presidencies - the Hungarian, Polish (both 2011) and Lithuanian (2013) - using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). Based on a growing body of literature, a number of country-, issue- and context-specific conditions for influence are identified and operationalized to integrate in a QCA scheme. The paper focuses on how these conditions apply to the different Presidencies, and discusses the advantages and possible disadvantages of the method for understanding Presidency influence.