The unexpected lawmaker: Explaining the European Council’s legislative agenda-setting

The European Council is not meant to exercise legislative functions. Yet, even a cursory look at the conclusions of its summits reveals that the heads do not shy away from providing specific recommendations and deadlines to the Commission and the co-legislators, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. Based on a new dataset including information on all legislation – concluded under the codecision/ordinary legislative procedure – mentioned in the conclusions of the European Council from 1999 to 2022, we investigate which factors make legislation more likely to be included in the summit conclusions. By casting light on an otherwise little-known aspect of EU policy-making, this paper makes an original contribution to the literature on EU agenda-setting. Theoretically, we build on the literatures on the EU’s polycrisis and the role of domestic politics in supranational decision-making to argue that, under certain conditions, the European Council will seek to actively participate in law-making. The heads focus their selective attention on specific legislative files and mandate the other EU institutions to comply. Empirically, by systematically analysing all the conclusions approved by the heads, we expect that the European Council’s legislative agenda has grown in policy areas where the EU was hit by a crisis and particularly after 2009, when the Lisbon Treaty institutionalised a permanent presidency for the European Council.