What drives this process of priority-setting – and how do the priorities affect law-making?

First, presenting national leaders as both responsive and responsible, we hypothesise that responsive leaders prioritise nationally salient issues, whilst responsible leaders select legislative proposals that are crisis-related and ‘stuck’. Our analysis partially confirms the expectations, tracing priorities back to media and public salience, as well as to the crisis.

Second, we look at the impact of prioritisation on the speed of the legislative process, controlling for file-level and institutional factors. Our mixed-methods analysis shows that leaders speed up law-making, but primarily early on in co-legislation, with a particularly pronounced effect since late 2009. Altogether, the analyses provide insight into the European Council as ‘unexpected lawmaker’. 

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