PROCESS OF DECISION-MAKING IN THE EU: POLICY NETWORK ANALYSIS

Being one of the theoretical approaches to the study of the EU, the goal of the analysis of policy networks is to identify the policy process actors, both governmental and non-governmental, and the structure of their interaction in order to describe, explain and predict the outcomes of the European public policy. Many authors claim that the exceptionally rapid development of this approach in the last thirty years (and its intensive EU application since the 1990s) can be attributed to the changes in the contemporary practice of governance. Namely, although public policy is above all related to the accountability of authorities in securing public goods, the tasks are increasingly allocated to a growing number of non-governmental actors, especially in the EU. In its analysis of policy networks the paper offers the typology of the actors and an array of the concepts which define the structuring of their interaction (in the policy literature the term policy network is used generically and also when referring to the EU). It also outlines the continuum of the types of EU policy networks which as independent variables affect the outcomes of the European public policy. The paper identifies which approach within the analysis of policy networks the application to the EU belongs to. In the EU research policy networks are understood as an instrument of the policy analysis that explains the decisions shaping public policy at the subsystem level of decision-making, which makes it necessary to combine it with other theoretical approaches for the other levels of decision-making and for the other types of decisions to grasp the entirety of the manner in which public policy in the EU is shaped. The policy network analysis contributes most to improving the understanding of everyday events in the process of creating European public policy, the events that change the environment in which key decisions are made as well as the actors' perceptions of their own interests.