Why does the EU deal with some issues but not others? This is the central question of this book dedicated to agenda-setting processes in the EU. Through a comparison of EU and US policy agendas and the analysis of four case studies in environmental and health policy, this book offers a new understanding of how policy issues come onto the EU agenda.

Palgrave Studies In European Union Politics publishes innovative research monographs on all topics of significance concerning the nature and operation of the European Union. It includes contributions from a range of disciplines to reflect the growing importance of the EU as a political, economic and social phenomenon. Why does the European Union deal with some issues but not with others? Answering this question is crucial if we are to understand how the EU makes policies and what kind of political system the EU is. This book engages with the processes that shape the EU's political agenda through a systematic analysis of EU agendas in the fields of environmental and health policies. Applying an innovative methodology to trace the attention for issues in policy documents, it analyses the development of EU agendas over the past three decades and compares them with agendas in the United States. In addition, it offers a theoretically grounded and empirically rich account of the processes that drive the formation of policy agendas in the EU through the in-depth analysis of four case studies. Presenting original research in an accessible format, it will be of interest to scholars as well as advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of European integration and policy studies. Book jacket.

This study of delegation and agency in the European Union, examines the role of supranational actors like the Commission, the Court of Justice, and the European Parliament in the process of European integration and in contemporary EU governance.

The European Union is the world’s most advanced international organization, presiding over a level of legal and economic integration unmatched in global politics. To explain this achievement, many observers point to its formal rules that entail strong obligations and delegate substantial power to supranational actors such as the European Commission. This legalistic view, Mareike Kleine contends, is misleading. More often than not, governments and bureaucrats informally depart from the formal rules and thereby contradict their very purpose. Behind the EU’s front of formal rules lies a thick network of informal governance practices. If not the EU’s rules, what accounts for the high level of economic integration among its members? How does the EU really work? In answering these questions, Kleine proposes a new way of thinking about international organizations. Informal governance affords governments the flexibility to resolve conflicts that adherence to EU rules may generate at the domestic level. By dispersing the costs that integration may impose on individual groups, it allows governments to keep domestic interests aligned in favor of European integration. The combination of formal rules and informal governance therefore sustains a level of cooperation that neither regime alone permits, and it reduces the EU’s democratic deficit by including those interests into deliberations that are most immediately affected by its decisions. In illustrating informal norms and testing how they work, Kleine provides the first systematic analysis, based on new material from national and European archives and other primary data, of the parallel development of the formal rules and informal norms that have governed the EU from the 1958 Treaty of Rome until today.

Explores how the framing of issues on the EU agenda affects policy-making. In a study that traces the highly contested developments in biotechnology policy over twenty years, the book introduces the conceptual and theoretical tenets of policy framing and shows how this analytical lens offers a unique perspective on issues in EU policy-making.

The book adopts an innovative analytical approach to agenda setting by not only presenting successful cases in which energy issues were addressed by means of public policy, but by also analyzing failed attempts to make issues part of the European policy agenda. Another outstanding feature of the book is its use of the latest empirical data on a broad range of energy issues. When are energy issues likely to find their way to the agenda of European policymakers? This is the key research question guiding this collection of empirical studies, which will shed light on both successful and unsuccessful attempts to include energy issues in the European agenda. The multi-level political system of the European Union represents a particularly fruitful setting for addressing this question due to the multiple institutional access points it provides for different groups of actors. The book has three key benefits. First, it provides a theory-informed analysis of agenda setting processes in general and in the European Union in particular. Second, it presents an overview of the most important and emerging dimensions on European energy policy, and third, it helps to develop a research agenda for future research in the field.

Readers are provided with a practical insight into how to analyze policies and policy-making in the EU. Using case studies to deepen readers' understanding, this book examines the various stages of the policy process - from the moment the issue reaches the agenda through to drafting, implementation and evaluation.