When the EU Council responds to public opinion: negotiating European policy integration

While the Council of the European Union has long been deciding on EU policy insulated from public scrutiny, we argue that enhanced transparency and EU politicisation have strengthened the linkage between its positions and public opinion. We expect further the Council to be more responsive to public opinion in member states, in which citizens view EU policy action as salient and are relatively united in their stance on it. To assess these expectations, we used semi-supervised machine learning to estimate the Council's positions on the expansion of the EU policy authority in legislative acts during the post-Lisbon period (2009-2019) and the Eurobarometer to measure public support for EU action in 21 policies across member states. The results offer evidence of territorial responsiveness of the Council.