Evidence-based policy-making in normatively divided policy fields: European Institute for Gender Equality, Agency for Fundamental Rights and Slovak policies tackling violence against women

Abstract

In recent years, we have seen a shift towards soft law policy-making within EU gender equality policies, embracing a new rationale of evidence as a promising panacea for the ills of democratic deficit. This shift has been fostered by the establishment of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) and the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), which both promote tools of benchmarking, ranking and good-practice sharing. Focusing on the relative impact of Europeanisation, this case study sheds light on the various processes of negotiating and resisting these indicator-based tools of policy-making by national actors in the field of gender-based violence. Gender-based violence is a normatively divided policy field in which actors struggle for limited resources. By viewing the accounts of the respondents through the framework of usage of Europe, we discuss the practices the actors engage in when employing the work of FRA and EIGE at the national level.