Legitimating the CAP: The European Commission's Discursive Strategies for Regaining Support for Direct Payments
Main
Abstract
In its public discourse, the European Commission presented the EU’s most recent Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as a paradigm change. Many observers of the CAP reform process, however, describe the recent agreement as a lost opportunity for change. This article describes and analyses the Commission’s discursive strategies in response to the legitimacy challenges regarding the CAP’s direct payments. We draw on the work of Mark Suchman (1995) to analyse these responses. The analysis reveals a progression of legitimation strategies that can be linked to the broader institutional environment, the setting of the ongoing policy process and the (critical) reaction of civil society organisations to these strategies. Besides shedding light on the progression of legitimation strategies, this article contributes to the literature on the Commission’s legitimation strategies more generally by linking the Commission’s public discourse to its public consultation regime.
Details
Article Keywords
Legitimation strategies, European Commission, Common Agricultural Policy, consultation
Issue
Section
Research Articles
Article Copyright
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Material published in the JCER is done so under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, with copyright remaining with the author.- Articles published online in the JCER cannot be published in another journal without explicit approval of the JCER editor.
- Authors can 'self-archive' their articles in digital form on their personal homepages, funder repositories or their institutions' archives provided that they link back to the original source on the JCER website. Authors can archive pre-print, post-print or the publisher's version of their work.
- Authors agree that submitted articles to the JCER will be submitted to various abstracting, indexing and archiving services as selected by the JCER.