Procedural democracy in the EU: the Europeanization of national and sectoral policy-making processes

The EU's ‘semi-pluralist' policy-making processes have had a differential impact on its member states' policy-making processes as a matter of institutional ‘fit', with greater disruption to the statist systems of France and Britain than to the corporatist systems of Germany and Italy. Such ‘macro' patterns of adjustment to the EU are complicated, however, by the ‘micro' patterns of policy-making in any given policy sector. These may differ from the ‘macro' pattern at EU or national level. This raises the question of whether we can still talk about Europeanization in terms of ‘macro' patterns of national policy-making. This article answers in the affirmative, demonstrating with the matched pairs of cases of France and Britain, Germany and Italy, that despite the fact that national patterns are less distinctive than in the past, they nevertheless remain distinguishable along a continuum from statist through corporatist, although pluralism has become a new default option in between the two.