This Module examines five missions of European Union Decision making. EU Decision making refers here to the process by which EU institutions adopt new policy instruments or amend existing ones. The missions show how decisions can be adopted or blocked by different actors i.e., EU institutions, EU member states, subnational governments, citizens, businesses, associations or others.
The Module aims to be part of courses on public policies, public administration/management, and EU law for both national and international graduate and postgraduate students in political science and public administration as well as in law. Since the cases cover crucial decision-making processes, it is also of interest for practitioners (i.e., public managers) at different organisational levels.
Main objective of the EU Decision Making game set
To provide a set of different scenarios of decision-making processes for policy fields that are relevant to the EU institutions. In particular, the missions explore how different actors participate in the decision-making process by enabling, fostering or blocking policy changes.
A broad picture of EU policy making
The game set presents a broad picture of policy making at EU level trying to cover the most important elements that characterize it i.e., multilevel decision making and the dual nature of law as resource and constraining factor. The game set introduces to the most frequent decisional configurations that allow to overcome the obstacles to decisional success (as well the most frequent mistakes that one should try to avoid). Therefore, the missions are quite different from each other and cover a variety of public policies. In the debriefing at the end of a session the instructor could either point out the more general lessons that can be learned from the case (with students in political science or economics or practitioners) or enter in more intricate EU law issues through the analysis of materials relating to the real cases that have been used to create the fictional games.
The missions
The missions are designed on the basis of fictional cases adapted from real successful initiatives. The following are the titles of those included in this game set:
Mission 1. Bus passengers rights
Mission 2. Right to vote in local referendums
Mission 3. Limiting data transfer to tax heavens
Mission 4. Animals in cages
Mission 5. A special status providing for exemptions for small islands
