According to the "new orthodoxy" in policy studies, involvement of actors outside an established policy community is needed to effect major policy reforms, since only they are capable of reversing the status quo tendencies of vested interests and established routines. These types of outside actors are typically, what Baumgartner and Jones have called, "macropolitical institutions", which have the authority to allocate tasks and (re)organize policy subsystems in a political system.
In the European Union (EU), the European Council is the first and foremost macropolitical institution, as it stands at the apex of the EU's political system. Following the logic outlined above, it can be assumed, then, that European Council involvement is needed to effect major policy change in the EU. This paper will therefore focus on the following question: Is European Council involvement a necessary condition for major policy change in the EU?
I will explore this question in three areas that have seen periods of inertia and major change over the past decades: agriculture, financial market regulation and justice & home affairs. In each area, I will make two types of analysis:
1. Building on an original database of coded European Council conclusions and existing assessments of major policy reform in these three areas, the overall links between (spikes in) attention and policy change will be explored.
2. For each area, a case study will take a closer look at the role of the European Council in instances of major policy reform, in order to find out if this role was indeed a necessary element in bringing about the policy reform.
