Seeking Gatekeeping: An Exploratory Analysis of European Commission Behavior

• In Event: Institutions and European Politics

Abstract

The Commission, with its monopoly over the power of initiation, is the ostensible gatekeeper of the European Union’s legislative process. Despite the formal power of the Commission, scholars have shown that the European Parliament and the Council are both able to exercise informal influence over its power of initiation (Rasmussen 2007, Gardner 2013, Kassim et al 2013, Webb and Kreppel, 2020). This article presents an exploratory analysis aimed at better understanding when and why the Commission chooses to exercise its gatekeeping powers and not act upon the agenda priorities of other core EU actors. To pursue this analysis, we leverage programmatically gathered, complete collections of European Commission legislative proposals, European Parliament own initiative reports, Council conclusions, and European Council Summit conclusions for the period from 2000 to 2020. With this data in hand, we use natural language processing to chart the salience of different topics to determine when the Commission chooses to ignore issues that matter to the Council and the Parliament. The results of this analysis will offer further insight into the dynamics of informal agenda setting within the European Union by showing when/how the Commission chooses to exercise its powers as the formal gatekeeper in the face of informal efforts to shape the EU policy agenda.

Authors

• Amie Kreppel, University of Florida

• Michael William Webb, University of Florida