Mistä EU-asioista hallitus keskustelee ja kenen aloitteesta? : Suomen hallituksen Eurooppa-politiikan koordinaatio vuosina 1995-2012

Kirjoittajat

• Anna Hyvärinen
• Tapio Raunio

Abstrakti

The political dynamics of European Union (EU) governance has arguably strengthened the role of civil servants at the expense of democratically elected office-holders. However, whether this applies to intra-cabinet EU decision-making is more difficult to analyze. Drawing on the agendas (1995–2012) of the Finnish ministerial EU Committee and on interviews with key civil servants, we examine whether the interests of governing parties or bureaucratic procedures are more important in deter­mining which EU policies are debated by the government and which in turn are decentralized to the individual ministries. Our analysis confirms the strong influence of both established administra­tive procedures and of a small elite of civil servants in setting the agenda of governmental EU policy formulation. We also show that intra-cabinet coordination focuses on high politics issues, with individual EU laws seldom discussed by the government, a finding which raises important questions about the accountability and democracy of domestic EU coordination.