5th Annual Conference Nice - European-microfinance.org

More documents

Recommendations

Info

40 5 th Annual Conference Nice Agenda-setting in this wider sense is mainly used as a concept for policy analysis at national level. Up to now it has not received much attention as a conceptual framework to analyse EU policy making. This is striking, since most of the scientific literature does characterize policymaking in the EU as a multi-venue process that offers many entrance points to actors that wish to influence the range of issues considered by EU policy makers. Agenda-setting should therefore be able to offer a valuable toolbox for the study of these processes. As applied to policy-making, the term agenda can be defined as “the list of subjects or problems to which government officials, and people outside the government closely associated with those officials, are paying some serious attention at any given point in time” (Kingdom 1995: 3-4). Cobb and Elder (Cobb/Elder 1972) draw a distinction between the systemic and the institutional agenda in political systems. As Parrish (Parrish 2003: 40) notes, in the European Union the function of a systematic agenda is carried out by the agendas of the European institutions, while the notion of an institutional agenda can be paralleled to the stage where issues are finally defined and European policies are shaped. Agenda-setting in the EU As a political system the European Union is characterized by a highly fragmented decisionmaking system with multiple avenues of policy making and many entry-points for influence. Also, the absence of a functioning mechanism of policy co-ordination and its complex multilevel system of governance create many paths for agenda-setting. This is even more the case if one considers the organisational structure of the European Commission, the most important institution in the agenda-setting process of the European Union. It is organised in different DGs, that are weakly coordinated administrative entities, dominated by a different policy making styles and administrative cultures (Knill 2005: 206) ii . The DGs rival constantly over the definition and the framing of issues and policy alternatives in the process of EU policymaking. Additionally, their staffs are in a sort of steady flux, making their agendas especially open for change and external influences. Conflicts and misunderstandings occur often, mostly due to missing or underdeveloped interfaces between the political and administrative level. Therefore, the European Union can be regarded as a relatively open institutional environment for agenda-setting processes. But due to the high amount of consensus needed to start decision processes, this holds not true for the whole agenda-setting process: „It may be easy to get someone at the EU level to consider an issue, but it is more difficult to get an issue high on the political agenda of the EU as a whole.“ (Princen 2007: 33) A framework for analysis For analytical purposes four elements or phases of the agenda process in political systems can be distinguished. The first phase is the phase of issue initiation or issue recognition, when the attention of policy-makers and those around them is drawn to particular problems or issues for the first time, hence allowing them to enter the agenda. This initial phase is followed by the phase of issue specification. This phase takes central stage in most studies of agenda-setting processes because the way an issue or problem is defined and demarked against other issues is an influential step for its further development on the agenda. It includes the specification of different policy alternatives and the process of linking them to the issue at hand. In the phase of issue expansion, political dynamics are at work to spread the specified issue further throughout the political system. Finally the phase of issue entrance when the issue enters the formal institutional agenda of the system concludes the agendasetting process. To build a more informed framework for analysis of the process of agendasetting in the EU the literature on national agenda-setting can be of great value. Especially two approaches are considered here, John Kingdon’s “multiple streams” approach (Kingdon
41 5 th Annual Conference Nice 1995) and the “punctuated equilibrium” theory of Baumgartner and Jones (Baumgartner/Jones 1993). Building on Kingdon’s work on agenda setting, three major forces that drive agenda-setting processes in political systems can be identified: problems, actors and institutions. To understand the dynamics of specific agenda-setting processes it is therefore important to analyse how these forces interact. Regarding agenda-setting in the EU especially two concepts of Kingdon can be of much help to model such interactions. The first is the notion of the important role of individual ‘policy entrepreneurs’ that influence the agenda-setting process in a political system by strategically coupling problems to policies through the use of issue framing. The second is the importance of temporal limited shifts in the politics stream (so called ‚opportunity windows’), like elections or changes in the mode of governance, that produce new patterns of problem recognition and policy alternatives and therefore offer strategically minded actors opportunities for the use of coupling strategies. Despite this notion of institutional opportunity windows, Kingdons’ approach lacks further specifications of the role of institutional aspects in the process of agenda-setting. Here Baumgartner and Jones’ approach to agenda setting offers a helpful addition, as they are bringing the role of policy images and policy venues to the forefront. A policy image is considered by Baumgartner and Jones as the way an issue is simplified, (re-) defined and specified for political discussion through experts and specialists. The elements of policy images are open for manipulation and their constant development is an important part of policy making. A single issue can be attached to different policy images, which emphasize different social or political aspects of the issue or even contradict each other. Policy images of issues are always constructed to address specific policy venues, which are understood as "the institutional locations where authoritative decisions are made concerning a given issue." (Baumgartner/Jones 1993: 32). The strategic use of this attachment of policy images to policy venues is called „venue shopping“ and is seen by Baumgartner and Jones as an important option for policy entrepreneurs and other actors in the process of policy making to get an issue higher on the agenda. It is especially useful in fragmented political systems, since "[m]any venues with only vague or ambiguous constraints on their jurisdictional boundaries create opportunities for strategically minded policy entrepreneurs to shop for the most favourable locus for their policies."(Baumgartner/Jones 1993: 36). In view of the fragmentation of the European Union policy making process as well as of the Commission’s administration, the concept of venue shopping seems especially suited to be used to understand how issues are framed in a certain way to address specific policy venues in the European Union’s institutional setting. An important part of this concept is to examine how policy images of issues and problems are defined to establish the supranational European level as the suited policy level to deal with them. (vgl. Princen 2007: 32). Actors and policy venues The processes of policy initiation are characterized by the importance of knowledge resources and technical expertise. In this respect, the literature on the policy making process of the EU notes that transnational networks of experts are playing an increasingly important role in many stages of the process (vgl. Richardson 2006: 5). These networks are reported to originate in scientific projects, funded by the Commission or working groups of independent non-state experts (Radaelli 1995: 171). One way to conceptualize such a network is to understand it as an ‘epistemic community’. An epistemic community is defined by Haas (Haas 1992) as a network of knowledge-based experts or groups with an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within the domain of their expertise. Members hold a common set of causal beliefs and share notions of validity based on internally defined criteria for evaluation, common policy projects, and shared normative commitments. (Haas 1992: 3). Following Zito (Zito 2001: 590f), one can assume that such networks or communities are especially important in agenda setting processes when the issue shows a high grade of uncertainty and addresses problems that are connected with accepted quantitative data sets.
Page 1 and 2: 1 5 th Annual Conference Nice
Page 3 and 4: 3 5 th Annual Conference Nice
Page 5 and 6: 5 5 th Annual Conference Nice syste
Page 7 and 8: 7 5 th Annual Conference Nice Thus,
Page 9 and 10: 9 5 th Annual Conference Nice month
Page 11 and 12: 11 5 th Annual Conference Nice lowe
Page 13 and 14: 13 5 th Annual Conference Nice The
Page 15 and 16: 15 5 th Annual Conference Nice fina
Page 17 and 18: 17 5 th Annual Conference Nice John
Page 19 and 20: Quantitative variables Variable Ave
Page 21 and 22: Introduction 21 5 th Annual Confere
Page 23 and 24: Number of employees (FT positions)
Page 25 and 26: 25 5 th Annual Conference Nice The
Page 27 and 28: Table 5 displays the use of time am
Page 29 and 30: Annual # of loans process per FT lo
Page 31 and 32: % 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0
Page 33 and 34: 33 5 th Annual Conference Nice prod
Page 35 and 36: Conclusions 35 5 th Annual Conferen
Page 37 and 38: Bibliography 37 5 th Annual Confere
Page 39: Introduction 39 5 th Annual Confere
Page 43 and 44: 43 5 th Annual Conference Nice ends
Page 45 and 46: 45 5 th Annual Conference Nice one
Page 47 and 48: 47 5 th Annual Conference Nice expe
Page 49 and 50: Issue expansion 49 5 th Annual Conf
Page 51 and 52: 51 5 th Annual Conference Nice Euro

5th Annual Conference Nice - European-microfinance.org

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?