The Commission as policy entrepreneur in European economic governance: a comparative multiple stream analysis of the 2005 and 2011 reform of the Stability and Growth Pact

Agenda‐setting, policy formulation, and the EU institutional context: The case of the Just Transition Fund

“…It is in fact easy to imagine that setting the agenda and preliminary deliberations about elements to be included in the first draft often go hand in hand. Consequently, the EU MSF literature often tends to consider the Commission as the main policy entrepreneur (e.g., Copeland & James, 2014; Schön‐Quinlivan & Scipioni, 2017). However, even though policy formulation in the EU is formally the Commission's competence, this does not mean that different actors and factors do not influence the process.…”

EU Sport Diplomacy: An Idea Whose Time Has Nearly Come

“…Amongst the first to apply the framework was Zahariadis (2008) who argued that EU policy outputs are the result of the interaction of the streams. Since then, the framework has been applied to a number of EU policies including: sugar (Ackrill & Kay, 2011), quality of life indicators (Bache, 2013), cohesion (Becker, 2019; Engl & Evrard, 2020), economic policy (Copeland & James, 2014; Saurugger & Terpen, 2016; Schön‐Quinlivan & Scipioni, 2017), banking (De Rynck, 2016), data protection (Goyal et al ., 2021), natural gas regulation (Herweg, 2016), children's rights policy (Iusmen, 2012), counter‐terrorism (Kaunert & Léonard, 2019), digital tax proposals (Lips, 2020), biofuels policy (Palmer, 2015), and tax avoidance (Roland, 2020).…”

The Council of the EU in Times of Economic Crisis: A Policy Entrepreneur for the Internal Market

“…When focusing on the EU level, we find various actors and different degrees and levels of policy entrepreneur. To date, several scholars have examined the European Commission as a potential policy entrepreneur (Steinebach and Knill 2017;Schön-Quinlivan and Scipioni 2017;Pollack 1997;Laffan 1997;Copeland and James 2014;Bauer and Becker 2014). This can be traced back primarily to the fact that the Commission is a supranational institution with the right of initiative that has increased its impact on EU policymaking over the years.…”

“…This can be traced back primarily to the fact that the Commission is a supranational institution with the right of initiative that has increased its impact on EU policymaking over the years. Especially in times when European beliefs and ideals are perceived as crucial and when supranational officials are regarded as more legitimate than domestic actors, the Commission has the potential to exert power and to push certain policies through (Moravcsik 1999: 280), resulting in its key role as a policy entrepreneur (Steinebach and Knill 2017;Schön-Quinlivan and Scipioni 2017;Copeland and James 2014). As the possibility of acting as a policy entrepreneur was often related to the Commission's function of proposing legislation, it comes as no surprise that there is little research when it comes to analysing intergovernmental institutions' potential to act as policy entrepreneurs.…”

“…The global financial crisis, which severely affected the European Union (EU) and its member states, offered a window of opportunity at the EU level that made it possible to place certain topics on the political agenda and to advocate changes in various policy areas (Verdun 2015;Saurugger and Terpan 2015;Falkner 2017Falkner , 2016. Research has demonstrated that the European Commission has acted as a policy entrepreneur and has been successful in placing and adopting certain policies (Steinebach and Knill 2017;Schön-Quinlivan and Scipioni 2017;Pollack 1997;Laffan 1997;Copeland and James 2014). This is due, inter alia, to the fact that the Commission succeeded in increasing its power in the wake of the crisis.…”