In the shadow of the European Council: When and how do national leaders influence everyday law-making?

The European Council regularly intervenes in everyday law-making by expressing legislative priorities in summit conclusions. We theorise and analyse the impact of these priorities on the duration of the EU’s co-decision (or ordinary legislative) procedure. Theoretically, we argue that the European Council increases speed through leadership. Leadership translates, via political authority, into limited hierarchical relations between the national heads of state or government on the one hand and the co-legislators on the other. Drawing on scholarship on institutionalisation, crisis politics, and multi-level negotiation, we hypothesise that the European Council’s priorities can speed up co-legislation. ‘Speeding up’ should happen, in particular, from late 2009 onwards, when the European Council became a formal EU institution and in crisis-related laws, when leaders leverage their EU-level authority. We assess our argument by using a mixed methods design. Our new dataset combines concluded legislation and pending proposals between 1999 and 2024 with the European Council’s legislative priorities. Event history analysis is bolstered with qualitative document analysis and semi-structured elite interviews. We find that leaders speed up law-making, but primarily early on in co-legislation, with a particularly pronounced effect since late 2009. Against our expectation, the European Council’s priorities do not accelerate legislation under crisis, but crisis-related laws themselves are concluded faster. Our paper provides new insights into how the European Council impacts on everyday law-making and on the widely debated topic of leadership in the EU and in other multi-level systems.