"What makes a good EU Presidency? Italy and Ireland compared*"

What makes a ‘good’ EU Presidency? A comparison between the two most recent Italian and Irish experiences in office can be instrumental in evaluating the crucial factors that affect presidency performance. The argument is developed in three main stages. Firstly, four key roles are selected in order to benchmark presidencies. Secondly, these roles are applied to the empirical record as criteria to devise a score-card of the two presidencies under consideration. Thirdly, the factors that affect the performance of the presidency are elicited, and are related to two mainstream theoretical approaches deployed in the study of the EU. It is argued here that socially constructed elements, such as expertise in EU affairs, political credibility, and attitudes towards European integration, have more explanatory leverage than purely power-based factors, such as country size, economic and political weight