Dynamics in EU policy-making : The liberalization of the European gas market

Abstract

The liberalization of the European gas market has become a long-lasting project for the European Union that has spanned over twenty years. Along the road there have been periods of gridlock in negotiations and unexpected concessions, which significantly differ from the initial positions of some powerful member states. These developments gave inspiration to many scientific studies and sparked a vivid academic debate along the lines of the general questions of the European integration literature. The majority of explanations concentrate either on the core interests of the powerful member states, the industrial lobbyists or the European Commission. By concentrating on a specific group of actors or a short period of time these explanations often overlook the dynamics behind the overall process.This thesis strives to close this research gap by depicting the overall dynamics and the interactions between different actors involved in the liberalization of the European gas market. It thus offers explanations of policy change and policy stability within the developments of the European gas market. The theoretical framework is developed based on the premises of Rational Choice and by combining assumptions from European Integration Theories and Policy Change Theories. The data problems are overcome by combining the insights from the agent-based simulations, qualitative and quantitative data analyses, hereby applying a mixed method research strategy. The agent-based simulations depict the process of policy making as a result of network formation and changing dynamics of actors’ choices. Such a model has not been developed in this set up so far. The qualitative analysis illustrates the debates surrounding major gas directives with the help of the discourse network analyzer. The quantitative analysis uses a new operationalization of policy change to systematically analyze the influences of different explanatory variables. The results indicate that decisive for the observed policy changes were the growing power of the Commission and contra-intuitively the enlargements of the European Union.