Issue Salience and Bargaining in the Council of the EU

How do varying levels of issue salience in the publics of the member states influence governments’ behaviour during bargaining at the EU level? Over the past decades, the European Union (EU) has faced several challenges which have polarized public preferences between and within member states, such as the Eurozone and "refugee" crises, concerns around the rule of law, COVID-19, and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Diverging preferences over key issues led to wide gridlock intervals and a limited ability to achieve meaningful policy change at the EU level in a timely manner. Crucially, member states’ publics can not only differ in their substantive preference but also in the relative salience they attribute to the issues facing the EU. Understanding if and how issue salience influences the bargaining behaviour of member state representatives as well as the overall bargaining environment is thus an important task for scholars of EU politics. In addition to issue salience at the national level, we also suggest that "issue diversity" – the dispersion of issues perceived as salient by the public in a given political system at a specific point in time – is a hitherto neglected factor which might influence both contestation in the Council and its ability to reach compromise. To study negotiations, we rely on the extended "Debates in the Council of the European Union" (DICEU) dataset of automatically transcribed public deliberations of the Council. The paper will improve our understanding of the impact of issue salience and diversity on conflict and agreement in heterogenous organisations, with important implications for the study of international and domestic politics.