From Policy Beliefs to Legislative Outputs: the Reform of EU Asylum Policy from a Relational Perspective

With the European Parliament’s approval of the New Pact on Migration and Asylum in April 2024, the reform of EU migration and asylum policy has taken its final steps. It comes after nearly a decade of deadlock since the so-called 2015 refugee crisis, and the incapability to reach an agreement on the European Agenda on Migration. Accordingly, the 2015 refugee crisis may be considered as a turning point within this policy area, showing the inadequacy of the system in facing crisis as well as everyday policymaking. Therefore, for nearly a decade, policy actors have discussed measures to be included in the final legislation, either by applying a ‘reformist’ approach and advancing alternative measures or a ‘conservative’ one, reiterating proposals already present with the crisis. The final legislation includes a total of ten provisions (nine regulations and one directive), amending all previous legislation in the field. Due to the role of the 2015 refugee crisis in bringing to light the deficiencies of the system, the objectives of this paper are twofold. On the one hand, adopting the perspective of the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (IAD) and of its Institutional Grammar (IG) tool, it strives to analyse the final version of the new provisions. On the other hand, adopting a more comprehensive stand of the policy process and building on the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), it investigates whether and to what extent policy beliefs brought up in the policy debate are represented in the final reform. At the empirical level, the analysis relies on two different data sources: the legislative texts for the analysis of the final provisions and newspaper articles for the analysis of the policy debate. Methodologically, it relies on Social Network Analysis (SNA). This paper brings forward three main contributions. Firstly, from a theoretical perspective, it brings together tools from the IAD and the ACF, aiming at tracing the evolution of a policy proposal from policy actors’ beliefs to legislative outputs. Secondly, from a methodological perspective, it merges the analytical tools of the IG, Discourse Network Analysis and SNA. Lastly, it applies its theoretical, analytical and methodological contributions to a highly contested contemporary policy output, namely the reform of the EU migration and asylum policy.