Talking heads: communication and responsiveness at the European Council

This paper examines how national leaders use public communication during European Council summits to signal responsiveness to their domestic constituencies. Drawing on a novel dataset of over 4500 media engagements during the summits between 2009 and 2025, the study explores how ‘representative claims’ – claims to represent domestic constituencies – in leader's public communication respond to electoral pressures and salience of EU politics. The results show that leaders use more representative claims during their public communication at European Council meetings particularly when facing upcoming domestic elections and when the salience of EU issues is high domestically. However, this pattern emerges predominantly in communication before the start of the negotiations. Hence, whether claim-based rhetoric is driven by strategic or responsiveness motivations remains unclear. These findings highlight that the European Council is both a high-level arena for consensual intergovernmental decision-making and a normalised stage for electorally-oriented public communication in a multilevel polity. The study contributes to the literatures on rhetorical representation and on the role of national elections and public salience in European-level decision-making processes.