Deciding upon the Banking Union: How a joint belief shift instigated deep institutional change in Eurozone governance

This paper explores how a joint belief shift among policy actors in the Eurozone crisis led to a deep institutional change in Eurozone governance: the banking union. Based on Rinscheid's framework of institutional change, we apply discourse network analysis (DNA) of actor statements in European newsmedia to show how banking union ideas emerged and gained ground between 2000 and 2012. We complement the DNA with analysis of secondary sources to provide explanations of how the rise and dissemination of banking union ideas came about. Our findings show that potential junctures in a crisis provide opportunities for policy actors to exploit and instigate a joint belief shift, but only if certain critical antecedents allow for this. Our study complements EU policy analysis studies by offering a fine-grained theory and methodology to assess and understand the role of (coalitions of) key policy actors and their ideas in processes of EU institutional change.