PUBLIC POLICY IN THE EU

Understanding Policy Public policy can be defined as whatever governments do (or avoid doing) to address society’s needs. Policy takes the form of platforms, programmes, public statements, and law, but is often also driven by crises, emergencies and opportunities. Formally, policymaking in the EU is driven by primary rules found in treaties, secondary rules in the form of laws adopted by the EU and judgements handed down by the European Court of Justice, and tertiary rules in the form of action programmes, strategies, declarations and other activities. Informally, there are numerous influences on policy, and numerous models have been developed to help understand the system.

The Policy Cycle The most common way of trying to understand the policy process is to see it in terms of a cycle:

The Qualities of EU Policy EU policy is driven by many of the same pressures as policy in the member states, but has six particular qualities: Compromise and bargaining. All democratic politics is driven by the need to blend multiple competing opinions into a common course of action. Political games. Individuals and groups vie with each other for influence and advantage. Multiple different games are at work concurrently in the EU system. Incrementalism. Policymaking rarely involves dramatic departures, and often builds on what came before. Multispeed integration. Member states often move ahead on different policies at different speeds, sub-groups of states occasionally agreeing their own initiatives. Spillover. The pressures of spillover are a key cause of policy initiatives. Elitism and the democratic deficit. The EU has long been criticized for moving ahead without putting its decisions to a democratic test.

The EU Budget Though relatively small, the EU budget has been the subject of repeated political squabbles over the years, driven by the core question of monetary independence, and the tensions between national contributions and own resources (independent sources of revenue). This has somewhat abated since the 1988 agreement to replace annual budgets with five-year budget packages. There is no EU debt, so budgets must be balanced, and spending is limited to 1.24% of the combined GDP of the 27 member states. Most revenues come from national contributions from the member states, and most spending goes to regional and social development, and to agriculture.

The EU Budget