New institutionalism and European public policy

How can policies remain in place despite clear evidence of their ineffectiveness and adamant efforts by critics to change them? Or why are certain groups able to dominate policy areas over long periods? The concept of an institution remains as vital as ever in accounting for such surprising stability in human behavior, and it has played a key role in advancing research on European public policy and European Union (EU) studies (Immergut, 2006; Radaelli et al., 2012). First brought to prominence as a response to the increasing dominance of agency-oriented approaches – most notably behaviorism and rational choice (Campbell, 2004; Hall & Taylor, 1996; Peters, 2019) – new institutional theories are joined by their emphasis on how structures are primary factors in producing outcomes at the level of the agent. 1 The route along which the different institutional theories arrive at this argument varies considerably (Peters, 2019), although in practice they tend to overlap and are often used in combination (e.g., Thelen, 1999).