Measuring quality of life for public policy: an idea whose time has come? Agenda-setting dynamics in the European Union

Abstract

Measuring quality of life has recently risen rapidly up the political agenda in a range of political arenas. In the EU context this is indicated most clearly by a Commission communication to the Council and European Parliament in 2009, ‘GDP and Beyond’, which sets out a roadmap with five key actions to improve the indicators for measuring progress. This initiative, along with similar developments both nationally and internationally, signals discontent with the dominance of gross domestic product growth as the dominant measure of societal progress and suggest that in some respects at least, concern with measuring quality of life is an idea whose time has come. This article seeks to explain how and why this issue has risen up the EU's political agenda through this initiative, drawing on Kingdon's (2011) multiple streams approach to agenda-setting and related contributions.

Keywords:

• Agenda-setting
• environment
• Eurostat
• multiple streams
• quality of life
• well-being

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Saamah Abdallah, Paul Alin, Andrew Oswald, Louise Reardon, Charles Seaford, Karen Scott, the three anonymous JEPP reviewers and students on the Politics and Quality of Life module at the University of Sheffield for their very helpful comments on this article.

Notes

While in some literatures the terms ‘well-being’ and ‘quality of life’ have specific meanings (for an overview, see Phillips 2006), in others they do not. Moreover, the language of politicians and policy-makers tends to elide between the two terms without there being any perceptible difference in meaning. Well-being/quality of life is understood here as being shaped by the eight dimensions identified by the Stiglitz–Sen Commission that have influenced the work of the EU and national governments: material living standards (income, consumption and wealth); health; education; personal activities including work; political voice and governance; social connections and relationships; environment (present and future conditions); insecurity, of an economic as well as a physical nature (CMEPSP 2009: 14–55).

While the most recent (fourth) edition is used here, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies was first published in 1984.

I am grateful to the anonymous JEPP reviewer who made this point.

The case study is based on data from 30 semi-structured interviews conducted with policy-makers and politicians in Brussels, Luxembourg and the UK between April and September 2011. I am grateful to the University of Sheffield's Rapid Response Knowledge Transfer Scheme for funding this research.

Policy entrepreneurs are ‘people who are willing to invest their resources in pushing their pet proposals or problems, are responsible not only for prompting important people to pay attention, but also for coupling solutions to problems and for coupling both problems and solutions to politics’(Kingdon 2011: 20).

Beyond monitoring progress, such indicators might also be used for informing policy design and for policy appraisal (Dolan et al. 2011: 4). On developments in the UK, see Bache and Reardon (forthcoming).

Stiglitz was Chair and Sen ‘Advisor’. While commonly referred to as the Stiglitz–Sen Commission, it is also sometimes referred to as the Stiglitz Commission or the Stiglitz–Sen–Fitoussi Commission, to include reference to the co-ordinator (Jean Paul Fitoussi).

This point was made by a number of interviewees.

Spoken contribution to the conference GDP and Beyond – Measuring Progress in a Changing World, hosted by the European Commission, European Parliament, Club of Rome, OECD and WWF in Brussels, 19–20 September 2007, available at http://webcast.ec.europa.eu/eutv/portal/archive.html?viewConference=7407&CatId=7371

See note 9 above.

However, this also reflects the political realities of EU competences, which are more limited in relation to other dimensions identified by Stiglitz–Sen such as health and education.

‘experts and professionals potentially become a stronger causal factor in convergence when they act as “policy entrepreneurs”‘ (Stone 2000: 7).