This paper asks how supranational actors respond to the increasing politicisation of ‘Europe’, with a focus on agenda-setting in EU law-making. Against the backdrop of increasing contestation, we explore the conditions under which national (electoral) politics ‘travels’ across the Union’s multiple levels, and analyse why the European Commission does (not) respond to domestic political pressures by prioritising specific pieces of legislation in its agenda. Drawing from the literatures on politicisation, policy responsiveness and non-majoritarian institutions, we argue that domestic politics impacts on the Commission’s agenda-choices through two mechanisms: indirectly via political parties and national governments, which respond to domestic politicisation by increasing pressure on the Commission as a policy-seeker in EU decision-making; and directly via the European Commission as a survival-driven bureaucracy, which responds to domestic political pressure in order to protect its policy-turf and political reputation. We expect the visible domestic politicisation of Europe to be activated and increased under three conditions: 1) a Eurosceptic public, 2) file-level salience, and 3) election proximity. We test our hypotheses on a new dataset including all European Commission priorities—as presented in the Commission’s Work Programmes—from 1999 to 2016, linked to our established data on the EU’s codecision procedure. Our preliminary empirical analysis, based on a sub-set of observations, suggests that national politics does, indeed, matter for the Commission’s agenda-choices: both changing levels of Euroscepticism and the number of national elections in a given year, particularly in the ‘big four’ member states, appear to be significant drivers of prioritisation in the Commission’s legislative agenda. These findings can inform the emergent debate about multi-level politics in the EU, and, more generally, shed light on the question of policy responsiveness by non-majoritarian actors under increasing politicisation.
