There is a plethora of handbooks addressing the European Union and European integration in general and a number of publications focusing on European policies. However, the field has so far fallen short of an interpretive perspective on European policy‐making and the development of EU policies. This handbook sets out to fill this lacuna by asking a set of questions, mainstream approaches tend to neglect, the most basic being: how do ideas, arguments, or discourses shape policies in the specific institutional context of the European Union as a multi‐level polity?

The book consists of a more general, conceptual part (with contributions, for example, by Claudio M. Radaelli, Sabine Saurugger, and Vivien A. Schmidt) and a second part covering individual EU policies. The third part tackles empirically topics cutting across different EU policy areas, such as the role of expertise.