Framing Europe: The Policy Shaping Strategies of the European Commission

By Mark Rhinard

About the book
Public policymaking increasingly takes place on an international stage, drawing attention to how international bureaucracies set agendas and shape policy outcomes. This book focuses on the European Union and reveals a key strategy used to influence policymaking by one of its central institutions, the European Commission. While most scholarship on the Commission examines its formal means of influence, this book demonstrates how the Commission employs a more informal method of “strategic framing” to manipulate the ideational framework in which policymaking takes place. This method helps the Commission to privilege certain actors, institutional processes, and policy goals in pursuit of preferred outcomes. The effects of strategic framing are examined in four cases of policy change in the fields of agriculture and biotechnology.

“Mark Rhinard has produced a significant study of policymaking in the European Union. He points to the complex interactions of ideas and institutions in making policy. The work is especially important for linking ideas of social construction with theories of the policy process. This book deserves reading by all students of the EU and public policy.”
B. Guy Peters, University of Pittsburgh

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