European Union Policy-Making: The Regulatory Shift in Natural Gas Market Policy (International Series on Public Policy)

This book furthers the ongoing theoretical development of the multiple streams framework, assessing its applicability to European Union (EU) policy-making processes. It systematically defines and identifies functional equivalents for all of the framework’s core concepts at the EU level and extends the framework in order to explain agenda-setting and decision-making. Furthermore, the book derives a set of explicit hypotheses to empirically assess the extent to which the (modified) framework is able to explain timing, agenda prominence, and policy change (or a lack thereof) for the EU natural gas directives passed in 1998, 2003, and 2009. The analysis documents that the framework is well-suited to explain the EU policy process in general and reveals where additional theoretical refinements are required.

Nicole Herweg is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Political Science at Heidelberg University, Germany. Her primary field of interest is comparative public-policy analysis, in particular European Union energy policy. She has published in leading political science journals, including European Journal of Political Research, Policy Studies Journal, and Policy Sciences.