The Changing Impact of the EU on its Member States’ Environmental Performance: A Quantitative Study of the Agenda Setting Power of the EU

A great part of the research on the EU’s environmental policy reaches the conclusion that the EU has carved out a role as an international environmental actor in its own right (Weale et al. 2000). This conclusion is based on studies which remain on the level of concepts (ecological modernization), policies and policy instruments (Spaargaren and Mol 1992; Baker 1997; Lenschow and Zito 1998), relying predominately on qualitative case studies (Zito 2000). Concerning the first aspect, Haverland (2005, 2) stresses the methodological issue that there is a “variation problem” when EU member states are not contrasted with non-EU member states. In a macro-comparative study of EU and non-EU countries the verdict is less enthusiastic: the EU’s effect on environmental policies “…is not as dominant as one would expect” (Holzinger et al. 2008, 180; see also Lafferty and Meadowcroft 2000). Looking not only at concepts and policies but also at outcomes shows that there are severe implementation problems concerning how individual member states perform (Jordan 1999; Kellow and Zito 2002; Scharpf 2006; Börzel et al 2010; Toshkov 2011). To tackle these issues the proposed paper draws on a large scale project of 21 OECD countries (including EU and non-EU countries) that focuses on outcomes (environmental performance) (Jahn 2016: Politics and Environmental Performance; Cambridge University Press). In the paper the environmental position of the EU is modelled by looking at the decision-making process within and among the EU institutions and their ideological misfits with member states’ governments (Jahn and Düpont 2015). The paper analyzes the period from 1980 to 2012 by applying an agenda setting power model and discovers significant shifts in the impact of the EU, particularly after the years of the Maastricht Treaty and during the recent economic crisis at the end of the first decade of the new millennium.