The evolution of the EU policy agenda on organized crime: (in)congruence between political institutions in their attention and problem definition

There is no consensual understanding of the problem of organized crime in the European Union. As a result, different perceptions and responses to this issue at the European level are present. This has implications for the policy process, as EU institutions have their own conceptions and strategies to face this problem. Although the ambiguous nature of organized crime has been extensively explored, thus far it has been scarcely studied the manner in which EU policymakers have attended and defined such problem; besides, there has been no research done on the effect of their different perceptions when interacting with a view to creating EU policies. This is fundamental to know, as public policies are the outcome of the interaction between political institutions, provided the convergence of their preferences. Congruence is however not occurring straightforward, largely promoted by the different designs of organizations. The key point of departure in policymaking is agenda-setting. In the EU, the European Council and the European Commission are the political institutions primarily responsible for initiating the path for the formation of policies. While the two bodies have the same function, they entail essentially distinct institutional architectures in terms of their political attributes to initiate an issue on the agenda, and of their information-processing characteristics to deal with the huge amount of information in the EU. This has an impact on agenda-setting. The paper aims at analyzing the effect of the interplay of these institutions on the evolution of the EU agenda on organized crime. In doing so, it studies their preferences in attention and issue definition, and compares them in interaction to identify to what extent their agendas have been congruent over time. This is done by means of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of core policy documents of these venues in the period between 1975 and 2013. The theoretical focus is the Agenda Interaction Approach, a conceptual model that posits that the evolution of the EU policy agenda is stimulated by the congruence and incongruence between the agendas of the European Council and the European Commission, given their distinct designs. In the long run, their interaction is characterized by agenda incongruence. That is, over time their agendas tend to diverge, rather than converge.