Europarties regularly organise summit meetings of party and government leaders prior to the European Council. So far only specific cases have been studied, with a focus on policy impact with regard to European Council meetings. By contrast, this article investigates Europarty summits – particularly the PES Leaders’ Conferences – empirically and systematically through a comparison across time and cases. On the one hand the focus lies on the organisation of and participation in pre-European Council meetings. On the other hand the article also explores the reasons why senior politicians from various political parties (do not) attend these summits. This article shows that Europarty summits (PES Leaders’ Conferences) have been increasingly institutionalised, that there is significant variation both within and across cases as far as participation is concerned, and that they serve different functions: elite networking, intra-party decision-making, soft policy coordination, bilateral contacts and media performance.