Mémoire
| Résumé : | The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union (EU) has undergone policy changes by the beginning of the 1990s. The First major policy changes were adopted under MacSharry Reform in 1992. Since then, it was shaped by successive reforms in 1999, 2003, 2008 and 2013. The CAP has contained a puzzle: Despite it has been questioning because of its lack of performance to answer the needs of different groups of the European society and these diverse criticisms were openly raised during the critical changes in the policy both at the EU level and the national level, it has still constituted one of the common policy of the EU, which takes almost 40% multi-annual budget of the EU (Feindt, 2018, p. 116). This puzzle has increased the research interest to examine the legitimacy of CAP at the EU level. Therefore, the research question of the final dissertation is how the EU legitimised the policy changes in the CAP and sustained the legitimacy of the policy.Two hypotheses were offered to address the question drawing on the legitimising mechanisms by Scharpf (1999) and Schmidt (2010). Considering the dimension of institutional forms and practice as well as ideational and discursive dimension of the legitimacy (Schmidt, 2010), I argue that analysis of the discourses that are directed to the general public during policy changes enables us to explain which type of legitimising mechanisms were used in this period. The first hypothesis is that in order to build citizen’s sense of legitimacy about policy choices during the CAP reform in 1992, 1999, 2003 and 2008, the EU proposed new policy areas from other contexts in the framework of the multifunctionality discourse by using output legitimising mechanism. The second hypothesis is that the EU launched a public debate in the framework of the discourse on transparency, inclusiveness and openness of decision-making process by using throughput legitimising mechanism in the 2013 reform period. The final dissertation uses discursive institutionalism as a theoretical framework which provides fundemental theoretical concepts to understand the discursive origin of the legitimacy of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. The empirical analysis of the study is based on problem perception approach (Lynggaard, 2019) to capture the discursive side of the legitimising mechanisms. This study shows that the EU has operated output legitimising mechanism for the acceptance of new policy choices by the citizens thanks to the multifunctionality discourses of the EU Commissioners responsible for Agriculture and Rural Development in the reforms of 1992, 1999, 2003, 2008 and the change in the discourse from the policy choices of the reform to the quality of decision-making process of the 2013 reform which were openess, transparency and inclusiveness. It was argued that a new reform in the CAP was decided by the call of European citizens not from top-down and policy choices were in line with the citizens’ choice thanks to the public debate which reconciled the people to the policy-making process. |
