Agenda setting in the European Union: from sui generis to mainstream

As a cooperation scheme between states, the European Union (EU) poses specific issues for agenda setting theory. For a long time, agenda setting was not discussed as a separate stage or aspect of policymaking in the EU studies literature. Over the past decades, this has changed. Still, the ambiguities in the nature of the EU's political system and the peculiarities in its policymaking system continue to pose theoretical challenges, which complicate studies of agenda setting in the EU. At the same time, these ambiguities offer exciting opportunities for theoretical advancement, as they shed new light on the EU and offer fertile ground for further developing agenda setting theory itself. This chapter first outlines the intellectual development of the study of agenda setting in the EU, placing it in the context of the development of EU studies more generally. Then it surveys the literature on EU agenda setting and the main claims it has produced. This is followed by a discussion of the main debates and avenues for future research in the field.