Original scientific paper
TAXONOMY OF POLICY PLAYERS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: DILEMMAS AND PERSPECTIVES
Simona Kustec Lipicer
; Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Abstract
The processes of Europeization have invaded the public policy
sphere and introduced into it, among other things, the altered views of the roles of policy players and their relationships in the processes of the formation and the implementation of public policy. As soon as
these new developments had been detected, numerous political science debates understandably ensued about the changed roles and
competences of the actors who operate at different political levels in
the European Union. The paper begins with the definition of the policy
actor in the research of the EU policy process. The usability of the
traditional and the contemporary understanding of the policy actor in
the EU policy system is looked into by means of the indicators of
(non)statehood and the existing view of the role of the state, thereby
articulating the dilemmas and the prospects for the potential new
taxonomies of policy actors that might emerge as a consequence of
the policy activity at the EU level, since the newly identified features
breed suspicion in the unequivocal adequacy of the existing taxonomy
of the actors. Also, the appropriateness of the categorization of
the players according to their political level or to the structural functional character of their activities is discussed.
Keywords
EU; policy players; state; civil society; typologies
Hrčak ID:
20373
URI
Publication date:
16.2.2007.
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