Patrycja Rozbicka

Institutions, policies, and arguments: context and strategy in EU policy framing

ABSTRACT Studies of framing in the EU political system are still a rarity and they suffer from a lack of systematic empirical analysis. Addressing this gap, we ask if institutional and policy contexts intertwined with the strategic side of framing can explain the number and types of frames employed by different stakeholders. We use a computer-assisted manual content analysis and develop a fourfold typology of frames to study the frames that were prevalent in the debates on four EU policy proposals within financial market regulation and environmental policy at the EU level and in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The main empirical finding is that both contexts and strategies exert a significant impact on the number and types of frames in EU policy debates. In conceptual terms, the article contributes to developing more fine-grained tools for studying frames and their underlying dimensions.

Who says what to whom? Alignments and arguments in EU policy-making

Abstract In the EU multilevel polity, domestic interest groups seek to shape EU legislation by accessing both national and EU institutions. Previous studies indicated that institutional and issue contexts as well as organisational characteristics shape their strategies of interest representation. However, we know much less about how alignments and arguments impact on their participation in EU and national policy consultations. Addressing this gap, we investigate the lobbying strategies of almost 2900 national interest organisations from five member states (Germany, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) on 20 EU directive proposals also bringing a new empirical scope to the study of multilevel interest representation. The findings indicate that alignments and arguments shape the participation of domestic interest groups in consultations on EU policies. We infer from our study that some general predictions of interest group behaviour are overstretched and outline four major variations of interest representation routines.

National interest organisations in EU policy-making

Abstract Comparative and EU interest group studies are marked by a progression towards theory-driven, large-N empirical studies in the past 20 years. With the study of national interest organisations in EU policy-making, this special issue puts centre stage a theoretically and empirically neglected topic in this research field. The individual contributions include interest group characteristics, institutional contexts as well as issue contexts as explanatory factors in their empirical analyses of multilevel interest representation. They present novel developments in the study of political alignments among interest groups and political institutions, the Europeanisation of domestic interest organisations, and the question of bias in interest group populations. Thereby, they not only contribute to the comparative study of interest groups, but also to the analysis of policy-making, multilevel governance, and political representation in the EU.

When Frames Are Not Enough: Consumer Safety and National Interests in EU Financial Market Regulation

The article investigates the predominant governance modes during the formulation of three EU directives in the wake of the global financial crisis as well as the amount of policy change they introduced. The directives regulate deposit guarantee schemes, alternative investment fund managers, and the investor protection scheme. We illustrate that different governance modes were employed in a sequential or nested order during their formulation. The EU’s financial market reforms were based on technocratic ad hoc committees, negotiations involving all EU legislative institutions, and to a lesser extent on the voting and executive modes. All three reforms tend to strengthen the delegation mode in financial market regulation and supervision. The sequencing and nesting of modes in these three cases casts doubts on assessments that posit close links between issue characteristics and governance modes. Rather than being determined by issue characteristics, the selection of governance modes is strongly influenced by the EU institutional context. There is disagreement on whether the financial market reforms are ‘gesture politics’ or whether they introduce new regulatory paradigm. Based on three indicators of political change—the perceptions of the policy advocates, the frames employed during the policy debate, and the extent of institutional reform—we find that these directives cover a greater scope and tend to be stricter than the previous legal provisions. They are embedded in the new master frame of stabilizing financial markets and enhancing consumer safety. In institutional terms, they are part of a transformation of the EU’s regime for financial market regulation that entails institutional layering and conversion.