AbstractThis article shows that the troika institutions – the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – formed a technocratic consensus about the desirability of establishing national fiscal councils in the European Union (EU). Considerable disagreement existed, however, with regard to their design features. Each institution promoted a distinct mode of indirect governance by ranking national fiscal councils depending on their adopted governance model (agent, trustee or orchestrator). This persuasion, through entrepreneurial benchmarking, constitutes an important mechanism by which member states were nudged to adopt a distinct fiscal council model. Preference heterogeneity among the troika members ultimately prevented the spread of a one‐size‐fits‐all fiscal council in the EU.