Institutional changes may lead to policy changes and the initial point of departure to promote these shifts is agenda-setting, where political attention to policy issues has a powerful effect in the policy-making dynamics, as decisions are taken only on those items that receive enough political consideration to get access to the agenda. In the European Union (EU), the European Commission and the European Council are two institutions of key interest, due to their role as formal and informal agenda-setters. Looking at the case of organized crime in the EU, a domain hardly studied from a political science approach, this contribution analyses the evolution of the political attention and problem definition given by each institution
over time, showing how inclusive the consideration to organized crime was and in what form it occurred within the two EU institutions. This is done based on the Punctuated Equilibrium Model that explains policy-making from an agenda-setting perspective as a process of both steadiness and striking shifts over time, by means of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of core policy documents of these venues. This analysis is the basis for further work on the interaction between the European Commission and the European Council, the policy consequences and the driving forces behind.
