1. Convergence and Divergence in the European Public Agenda
Daniel Devine
@DanJDevine
djohndevine.wordpress.com

2. Research overview How have public agendas changed over time?
Are countries’ agendas becoming more or less similar (converging or diverging)?
Measuring a ‘European’ public agenda
What are the potential ramifications for European politics?

3. Public Agendas
The public agenda is the set or range of policy areas which the public is paying attention to (Jones and Baumgartner, 2004)
It influences policy output at both the domestic level and the European level (Jennings and Wlezien, 2015; Hagemann et al, 2016; Toshkov, 2011)
Governments pay more attention to, legislate more in, and highlight policy differences on the most important issues
Understanding the changing public agenda is a good way of understanding political instability and cooperation across Europe
We don’t yet know about this change; how to measure it to test its worth; or whether there is any pattern.

4. Drivers of Change Three ‘focal relationships’ (Vatter et al, 2014)
Globalisation: converging on optimal policy options due to market openness (convergence)
Europeanisation: supranational harmonisation of policy forces convergence in member states (convergence)
Domestic factors: alter how individual states react to policy harmonisation (divergence/convergence)
These drive policy convergence (Franzese & Hays, 2008), (Vliet, 2010; Draxler & Vliet, 2010). Do public agendas follow the same path?

5. Data and Method
‘Public Agenda’ is measured by the ‘Most Important Problem’ (MIP) question in the Eurobarometer survey,
12 agenda items, ranked by the percentage saying that that item is the most important.
Countries included are the EU25 (excludes Bulgaria and Romania (2007) and Croatia (2013)).

6. E.g… (Doesn’t add up to 100% - can choose two issues) Country YearUK
2004
55%
12%
14%
Germany
70%
25% 2%
(Doesn’t add up to 100% - can choose two issues)

7. Data and Method Measuring similarity: ‘Sigma-convergence’
Change in standard deviation between countries over time on the 12 agenda items.
Increasing SD means divergence, and decreasing SD means convergence
Widely used in economics and public policy, almost never in political science (see Vatter et al, 2013)
Answers: are countries more or less dispersed on what they see as most important?

8. Findings – Issue items
Unemployment

9. Findings – European Agenda
Explain here that this the average of SD across all 12 issues – this is the measure of public agenda similarity, rather than on each issue. Each issue can be addressed in the paper.

10. Summary How have public agendas changed over time?
Converging around the recession (systemic shock)
Slow divergence afterwards
Are countries’ agendas becoming more or less similar (converging or diverging)?
Problem: Diverging, except for external shocks
Problem: clustering of countries.

11. Summary What are the potential ramifications?
Groups of countries with similar interests, which are fundamentally different from other groups
We have not seen converging of public agendas like we might expect from policy or economic convergence
Unevenly distributed effects from external shocks (immigration?)
Result: problematic cooperation, potentially more differentiated integration, a system fragile to another external shock. Or am I pessimistic?

12. Next steps…
Establish a stronger link between public and government agendas
What drives changes in public agendas?
Visualising the country clusters
Methodological problems: standardization, problems with the survey (dropped/changed categories).