Obligation or Socialisation? Attendance at Ministerial Meetings of the Council of the EU and the Rotating Presidency

A remarkable share of decisions in the Council of the European Union are agreed upon by civil servants and diplomats rather than elected politicians, which poses a legitimacy concern and has been identified as part of the alleged democratic deficit in the EU. On top of that, even though ministers are supposed to attend top-level Council meetings, this is not always the case. This paper explores patterns of ministerial attendance to Council meetings and the impact of the rotating Council presidency on it using a new dataset of hand-coded attendance lists from 2010 to 2017. The findings indicate that in one third of the cases lower level officials are sent to Council meetings instead of ministers, underlining the issue of legitimacy. Furthermore, while ministerial attendance peaks during a country’s Council presidency, the rates decrease immediately after suggesting that the position does not have a significant socialising impact on national politicians.