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The European Union has been given many names: ‘Regulatory State’, ‘Policy-Making State’, even a political entity with ‘policy without politics’. The latter is certainly outdated, yet the fact remains that the European Union main task is creating and implementing policies. In this course, we will focus on the policy-making role of the Union without, however, forgetting about its politics.
In an interactive classroom setting we will try to understand and assess the most important institutions and processes in EU politics. To do so, we will read, discuss and critique the latest academic findings in the field of EU governance, as well as EU (and national) policy documents. The course can broadly be divided into two different parts.
In part 1 we try to understand what the European Union is and how it works, especially with a view to it’s most important function: producing legislation. We discuss different perspectives on the EU as a political system and get to know the central institutions. In order to understand how the EU works, we zoom into three of the central institutions. In part 2, we focus on the policy-making process of the Union. Having gotten to know the institutions, we will focus on the different steps in EU policy-making, from deciding whether or not to initiate a policy to implementing it in the member states. In the end, we will bring politics back into the course, discussing the challenges and pitfalls of the EU: Euroscepticism, missing trust and perceptions of transparency and legitimacy. In the end, the course will have prepared students to write a good policy brief as the final assessment, allowing them both to practice this very specific form of professional writing and applying the knowledge obtained during the course.
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