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The European Commission recommends evaluations of the economic plans of member states. The Council then provides final text. Previous research suggests that the Council selectively edits the Commission's recommendations. Both large member states and those with eurosceptic populations are likely to have the Council weaken what the Commission writes about them. We examine the determinants of the Council's editing of these texts after the introduction of the European Semester in the period 2011–18. We also account for different varieties of euroscepticism as the literature has become more differentiated. Using metrics of textual changes based on automated and hand-coding, we find little evidence of a systematic relationship between euroscepticism and textual editing. We do, however, find evidence that member state's voting power and euro status matters. Our findings suggest that eurosceptic no longer affects textual editing of such documents under the European Semester.
The Stability and Growth Pact clearly failed to prevent the euro crisis. We contend that the failure was due largely to the ability of the Member States to undermine the Pact’s operation. The European Commission served as a “watchdog” to monitor fiscal performance. The Member States themselves, however, collectively had the ability to change the content of the reports for individual states. We confirm the expectation that powerful Member States had the most success in undermining the role of the Commission. Perhaps more surprisingly, we find supporting evidence for our argument that governments with euroskeptic populations behind them were also more successful in weakening the Commission’s warnings. These results have broader theoretical implications concerning which mechanisms explain country-specific outcomes under a shared rule. Another contribution is the creation of a new data set of European Commission assessments of Member State economic programs and Council of Minister revisions.