Policy integration in the European Union: mapping patterns of intersectoral policy-making over time and across policy sectors

Abstract

Policy integration has become an important principle guiding public policy development. Despite its prominence, we lack comprehensive knowledge of the exact degree of policy integration and its variation across policy sectors and time, mainly due to the lack of systematic measurement approaches. We address this shortcoming by (1) developing a novel measure that evaluates the intersectorality of legal acts and (2) assessing its development in the European Union over four decades (1977–2019) for 16 policy sectors. Our mapping reveals that, on average, intersectoral policy-making has increased since the 1990s with the most substantial rise during the Barroso I and II Commissions and a trend reversal after Juncker took office in 2014. Furthermore, we identify substantial variation in intersectoral policy-making between different policy areas reflecting varying levels of political attention and public salience. We deem our measurement concept and findings to have important implications for the study of policy integration in general and the study of EU policies in particular.