The governance of the European Union a new institutionalist approach

Abstract

The hypothesis: The main aim of this paper is to analyse three central issues of the governance of the EU. It seeks to locate the EU institutions in a comparative politics context, which allows us to go beyond the detailed configurative studies of the EU institutions that already exist and place them in a context, which allows differentiation between formal political institutions, informal conventions and the norms and beliefs embedded within those institutions. The shortcomings of employing the new institutional approach to the study of the EU are more related to the general weaknesses of this particular perspective. The problem is that little but common scepticism toward atomistic accounts of social processes and a common conviction that institutional arrangements and social processes matter unites various branches of the new institutionalism. New institutionalism seeks to impose a unity of perspective on a set of figures that actually have little in common.