Policy entrepreneurship in the European Parliament: reconsidering the influence of rapporteurs

ABSTRACT

Rapporteurs have been widely recognized as influential agents within the European Parliament (EP). But under what conditions are they really able to wield influence? Linking two strands of literature largely isolated from each other, this article considers both formal and informal agenda-setting resources to address this question. Formal agenda-setting stresses the role of institutionally defined prerogatives and constraints. Informal agenda-setting offers a meaningful link to the multiple streams framework (MSF), which attributes causal power to agency, ideas and timing. A case study on the EU chemicals regulation REACH illustrates the interdependence of institutional and ideational factors in policy entrepreneurship.

KEYWORDS:

• Agenda-setting
• European Parliament
• multiple streams
• policy entrepreneurship
• rapporteurs
• REACH

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Christian Stecker, Sven T. Siefken, Eva Ruffing, Lucy Kinski, the three anonymous reviewers and the journal editor for their helpful comments. An earlier version of the article was presented on the panel ‘Parliaments in the Policy Cycle’ at the ICPP Milan 2015.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Stefan Thierse is Assistant Professor at the University of Düsseldorf.

ORCID

Stefan Thierse http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8033-9191

Notes

1. According to Entman’s (1993: 52) seminal definition, ‘[t]o frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described’.

2. This is also an implicit assumption in Kingdon’s (2003: 60; 178) work.

3. Interview IP07.

4. Interviews IP03; IP08.

5. Interviews IP02; IP03; IP06; IP08.

6. Interview IP01.

7. Interviews IP01; IP03; IP07.

8. Interviews IP05; IP07; IP08.

9. The content analysis was performed with the software MAXQDA. Please consult the Supplemental section for the dictionary and a statistic of the exact word frequencies. The full plenary debate is available under http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+CRE+20051115+ITEM-025+DOC+XML+V0//EN&language=EN (accessed 21 September 2017).

10. Interviews IP04; IP07.

11. Interview IP04.

12. Interview IP03.

 

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was funded by a doctoral scholarship awarded by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.