"The institutional terrain of the European Union"

Fligstein, Neil and McNichol, Jason. (1997) "The institutional terrain of the European Union". In: UNSPECIFIED, Seattle, WA. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Policy domains form where there exists a constitutional agreement to create legislation, a collective definition of what issues are and who gets to be an actor, and procedures to mobilize the production of new rules in the domain. Policy domains may be entirely constituted by government organizations or may also include nongovernmental groups. We explore the EU as a set of policy domains. We demonstrate that the Treaty of Rome and its subsequent revisions defined the issue arenas. We also show how the organizational structure of the European Council of Ministers and the Commission mirror these domains. Finally we plot the expansion of pressure groups and legislative output to domains over time. We show that the Treaty changes, which changed the decisionmaking rules in the domains, tended to be in domains where there were a large number of nongovernmental organizations and where legislative output was high. For example, the largest number of pressure groups in the EU circa 1980 were attached to the Single Market domain. We view this as a kind of spillover. By our calculations, at least 13 of the 17 policy domains in the EU exhibit a supranational character.

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