Framing, narrating and convincing: the role of information and ideas in the EU policy process

Abstract

Since the mid-90s public policy analyses has experienced the socalled «argumentative turn». These approaches developed in the US but quickly became usual in the study of the EU policy process. This is striking given the dominance of the rational choice theory in EU studies during this time and because the EU lacks a public space. However the article argues that this turn can be understood thanks to some similarities in the policy process: the EU is also a system of checks and balances characterised by the involvement of diverse actors in which the alignment of interpretative frame in the medium and long term contributes to create the broad coalitions that are required to establish and change the agenda. The article reviews the contribution of epistemic or ideas-centred approaches in explaining the European policy process. From the theoretical point of view these analyses provide a wide perspective on the actors involved and provide heuristic mechanisms to analyze actors’ agency in the correspondence between collective action strategies and the institutional agendas. These approaches also formulate hypotheses on the importance of learning and interpretive frame alignment that imply some epistemological and methodological ambiguities but also shed potential for large N and mixed methods designs.

Received: 19 May 2016
Accepted: 21 June 2016
Published online: 31 October 2016