Talking Heads: The European Council as a Public Event

The European Council is a key political actor in the European Union. Though it does not hold formal legislative powers, it acts as powerful agenda-setter and gives strategic guidance to the Union’s policymakers, often intervening in matters that could not be resolved at lower levels or that require direct leaders’ involvement. For these reasons, it has gained a high external visibility in national media and public discourse. Despite the secluded and confidential nature of its sessions, national leaders regularly engage with media both before and after Council sessions, briefing the press on the items on the agenda, clarifying national positions and, sometimes, targeting domestic constituencies on purely national matters. Even though European Council decisions are carefully prepared by various preparatory bodies, the involvement of national leaders on the day of the meeting is often required to decide controversial or salient issues. This paper presents a novel dataset on EU leaders’ press statements during European Council sessions. It contains more than 7,700 statements made during doorstep remarks or press conferences by 130 unique speakers from 2009 to 2024. The statements are automatically transcribed from videos available on the Council’s website, and validated. With the help of multilingual large language models, the data is used to capture national priorities and positions, assess their heterogeneity, and inspect the proximity to the outcome of the collective deliberation.