Resistance to Policy Change in the European Union: An Actor-Centered Perspective

Through the motto "Better regulation", EU institutions (and specificially) the EU Commission have pursued an approach that depoliticizes the issues at stake with policy change. However, the recent developments in the EU have shown that regualtion, deregulation or re-regulation often triggers various forms of (active or passive) resistance. While taking stock of existing research on Euroscepticism, social movements, Europeanization and non-compliance, the paper seeks to go beyond its limitations and proposes a broader analytical framework.  In a perspective centered on the conflicts that drive agency, this framework shall serve to study resistance to policy change in the EU in three constitutive dimensions: its causes, its forms and its effects. To study the causes of resistance, we suggest paying more attention to the nature of regulation and how such change is perceived and framed by agency. This allows us to formulate three hypotheses: a 'proportionality hypothesis', a 'positive-negative integration hypothesis', and a 'disposition hypothesis'. As far as the forms of resistance are concerned, we argue that knowledge of the type of instruments used by resisting agents is crucial to understand the effects of resistance at the different stages of the policy cycle, from agenda setting to evaluation.