Does the European Union have a reverse gear? Policy dismantling in a hyperconsensual polity

ABSTRACT

The financial crisis has triggered demands to halt and even reverse the expansion of European Union (EU) policies. But have these and previous demands actually resulted in policy dismantling? The existing literature has charted the rise of dismantling discourses such as subsidiarity and better regulation, but has not examined the net effect on the acquis. For the first time, this contribution addresses this gap in the literature through an empirical study of policy change between 1992 and 2014. It is guided by a coding framework which captures the direction of policy change. It reveals that, despite its disposition towards consensualism, the EU has become a new locus of policy dismantling. However, not all policies targeted have been cut; many have stayed the same and some have even expanded. It concludes by identifying new directions for research on a topic that has continually fallen into the analytical blind spot of EU scholars.

KEY WORDS:

• Austerity
• blame avoidance
• deregulation
• environmental policy
• European Union
• policy dismantling

Acknowledgements

Earlier drafts were presented at the 2014 UACES General Conference in Cork and the 2015 EUSA biennial conference in Boston. We are grateful to the insightful feedback received there. We would also like to thank John Turnpenny, Tim Rayner, Brendan Moore, Jonas Schoenefeld, Jeremy Moulton and the two anonymous journal reviewers for more detailed comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Viviane Gravey is a doctoral student in the Tyndall Centre, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, UK.

Andrew Jordan is professor of environmental policy in the Tyndall Centre, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, UK.

Additional information

Funding

The data presented in this paper is part of Viviane's PhD project and can be accessed by contacting Viviane. It was funded by the University of East Anglia. We also acknowledge the support of the COST funded Action INOGOV (IS1309): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378014001605; and the ESRC UK in a Changing Europe Initiative: http://ukandeu.ac.uk/.