The Commission's agenda: an analysis of changing policy attention of the European Commission from 1995-2012

This thesis is concerned with the changes in the agenda of the European Commission. Using a newly created coding scheme, inspired by the Policy Agendas Project combined with lists of Commission portfolios and Directorates-General, natural sentences of all work programmes from 1995until 2012 are coded. This data is used to track changes in policy attention during the period from 1995-2012. A detailed description is given of the changes found in four specific policy areas: institutional operations; justice and home affairs; economic and financial policy; and social policy. For several of these policy areas, statistically significant correlations are found between changes in the level of attention for those policy areas and shifting political ideology of the Commission and the largest party in the European Parliament. Furthermore, although hard evidence for causal relationships between certain events, such as an economic crisis, and changing policy attention cannot be found due to the used methodology, a first step towards finding which events play a role in the causal processes that cause changes in the agenda can still be made.