Wednesday, June 26, 2013
2.21 (Binnengasthuis)
The migration policy agenda of the European Union is the outcome of complex relations among information, institutions, actors’ interaction, and the priorities and images of migration that those actors and institutions bring forward. While in the last three decades the EU’s involvement in migration issues evolved from flexible coordination to supranational governance, these dimensions became increasingly complex – and so did the whole environment for EU policy-making in migration. This paper focuses on the effects of these dynamics on agenda-setting processes. It asks how the transformation of the EU immigration policy process impacts on the capacity of single EU institutions to influence policy decisions, and what consequences it has on public policy. To answer these questions, the paper enters in the black-box of EU policy-making and puts the agendas of EU institutions in relation to each other. Based on an original dataset of the migration policy agendas of EU institutions (1975-2010), it analyses how priorities and images of migration are transmitted throughout the EU policy process with the aim to disentangle the capacity of single EU institutions to have their priorities upheld on to EU legislation. What happens when the European Council reorganises its priorities with respect to migration? What is the capacity of the European Commission, the European Parliament, or the Council of Ministers to translate their preferences into EU legislation? Do changes emerge in supranational or intergovernmental institutions? Does a high- or a low-politics route to agenda change prevail? Is any venue relatively more in control of agenda-setting? And, ultimately, how do these patterns change following the transformation of the EU institutional framework?
