Measuring political attention of issues in the Brexit negotiations

The Brexit negotiations received a high degree of attention from EU institutions with the European Council (Article 50), and the General Affairs Council (Article 50) and through its Ad Hoc Working Party on Article 50 setting out the mandate for the negotiations. We use two novel datasets that cover the period of negotiations on the Withdrawal Agreement and the Trade and Co-operation Agreement, 2016-2021 to analyse whether the levels of salience attached by the member states on 20 important issues in the negotiations influenced the political attention that these received. Our first dataset has content coded data collected from European Council and General Affairs Council Conclusions, the Political Declaration on the future relationship, negotiating guidelines, Council decisions, and statements made by the President of Donald Tusk. Our seconded dataset contains the levels of salience attached to 20 issues by each member state gathered and coded using the Decision-making in the EU methodology. Our initial findings confirm a correlation between issues that member states considered to be important and the attention that they received in Council Conclusions and decisions, and by President Tusk. While our findings confirm those made in previous studies, we argue that the level of attention attached by member states to issues demonstrated a high degree of control over the negotiations.