Key Features of Policy Processes

The EU’s arrangements for making policy — that is, its policy processes — display many distinctive features. This chapter identifies and analyses the most striking and important of these, grouping them under the following sub-headings: the large and increasing number of policy processes; the complexity of policy processes; the varying mixtures of supranationalism and intergovernmentalism; the ways in which policy processes are constructed and operate to ensure that all member states have confidence in the EU system; the dispersal of leadership; the consensual nature of (most) policy processes; the role of ideology; the production of policy outputs; variations in the speed of policy processes; and the impact of differentiation.