This paper investigates the link between party cohesion and agenda setting in the European Parliament. The paper proposes a modified version of Cox and McCubbins’ (2005) Cartel Agenda Model to help explain how institutional structures can privilege some actors at certain times, and other actors at other times. In particular, it shows that the ability to control the legislative agenda is dependent on the ideological and policy positioning of party groups in different issue areas. The analysis focuses on the crucially important, yet chronically understudied, Conference of Presidents – a decision making body within the European Parliament made of party group leaders that have control over the legislative agenda. The paper employs a detailed and theoretical evaluation of the parliament’s rules of procedure in order to produce a number of testable hypotheses. This is followed by a large-scale quantitative analysis of the European Parliament roll-call dataset, as well as an original database of proposal delay in the Parliament. It shows that the institutional set-up of the Parliament’s rules of procedure means that it is the median party on any given policy dimension that holds agenda-setting powers. This paper offers valuable insights into the effects of control of the plenary agenda in the Parliament, and into who, in fact, is able to prevent certain issues from being discussed on the floor.
