One Agenda Setter or Many? The Varying Success of Policy Initiatives by Individual Directorates-General of the European Commission, 1993ꟷ2016

The European Commission holds a far-reaching monopoly of legislative initiative in the European Union. Extant analyses of whether this formal agenda-setting role translates into legislative influence vis-à-vis the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament (EP) often treat the Commission as a single, unitary actor. This contrasts starkly with organizational research showing that political interests, sectoral orientations. administrative resources, as well the need for internal coordination vary heavily across the individual Directorates-General (DGs) of the European Commission. Do these internal rifts affect the Commission’s ability to shape the European policy-agenda? This paper develops corresponding expectations and tests them in a new data set on the more than 6,000 policy proposals the European Commission has tabled between 1993 and 2016. Agenda-setting success of each initiative is measured by an automated text analysis algorithm that retrieves the similarity between the original Commission proposal and the ultimately adopted European law. Multivariate analyses of this indicator initially confirm that unanimity requirements in the Council and more involvement of the European Parliament constrain the Commission’s ability to push its policy ideas through. But the results also show that agenda-setting success varies systematically with the responsible Commission DG: An initiative experiences less change when it is drafted by a DG with high administrative resources and when the responsible Commissioner is a more experienced politician who is ideologically closer to the representatives in the EP and the Council. In addition, proposals that have experienced more seamless coordination inside the Commission have a higher chance to remain unchanged during inter-institutional negotiations. These findings qualify the unitary actor assumption strongly and deepen our understanding of legislative decision-making in the EU. Moreover, they highlight that the process of selecting the Commission president and individual Commissioners as well as the resulting organization of the Commission matter for the rules that govern European societies.