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Existing literature is overwhelmingly skeptical about the capacity of the Council Presidency to shape the EU agenda. The presidency's ability to promote private concerns is considered highly limited &, typically, the presidency is depicted as a "responsabilite sans pouvior." This article challenges the conventional wisdom on theoretical & empirical grounds. Theoretically, it develops a conceptual framework that expands the notion of influence, by distinguishing between three forms of agenda-shaping: agenda-setting, agenda-structuring, & agenda exclusion. In this exercise, I draw on theories of bargaining & decision making developed in international relations & American politics. Empirically, the article provides an inventory of the instruments available to the presidency within each form of agenda-shaping, as well as illustrative cases that demonstrate how presidencies regularly influence outcomes in EU policy making. Illustrations are drawn primarily from the six consecutive presidencies in the period 1999-2001: Germany, Finland, Portugal, France, Sweden, & Belgium. 39 References. Adapted from the source document.

The contemporary debate on compliance has been framed in terms of two contending perspectives on how best to make states comply with international rules: enforcement or management. Whereas enforcement theorists stress a coercive strategy of monitoring and sanctions, management theorists embrace a problem-solving approach based on capacity building, rule interpretation, and transparency. In this article, I challenge the conception that enforcement and management are competing strategies for achieving compliance. Based on the case of the European Union (EU) and a comparison with other international regimes, I suggest that enforcement and management mechanisms are most effective when combined. The twinning of cooperative and coercive instruments in a "management-enforcement ladder" makes the EU highly successful in combating violations, thus reducing non-compliance to a temporal phenomenon. An examination of regimes in the areas of trade, environment, and human rights lends additional support to this proposition; compliance systems that offer both forms of mechanism are particularly effective in securing rule conformance, whereas systems that only rely on one of the strategies suffer in identifiable ways.

All negotiations in international organizations and all multilateral conferences are chaired by member state representatives or supranational officials, with mandates to manage the agenda, structure the deliberations, and broker agreements. Yet existing literature offers no coherent explanation of the sources of this institutional practice or its effects on negotiation outcomes. The intention in this paper is to present the first cut of a theory whose purpose it is to address this gap. The paper asks two main questions: What explains the emergence of the chair as a governance form in international negotiations? What determines the influence of the chair over multilateral bargaining outcomes?

In recent years, the question of what determines compliance with international regulatory agreements has gained an increasingly prominent position on the research agenda through a burgeoning literature on international regime effectiveness and international legal systems. The contemporary debate is framed in terms of two alternative perspectives on compliance: enforcement or management. The two perspectives present contending claims about the most effective means of addressing non-compliance in international cooperation. Whereas enforcement theorists characteristically stress a coercive strategy of monitoring and sanctions, management theorists embrace a problem-solving approach based on capacity building, rule interpretation, and transparency.

This article presents a rational institutionalist account of why the Commission and the ECJ vary in their capacity to pursue successfully a supranational agenda. In the empirical part, the explanatory power of this approach is illustrated through a comparison of the Commission's and the ECJ's autonomy in the pursuit of a joint agenda in EU enforcement. The article suggests that the EU as a strategic context is comparatively more open to autonomous actions and supranational influence by the ECJ, which is subject to less intrusive control mechanisms and enjoys more accessible means of rule creation than the Commission.