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How Cycling Rode to the European Agenda

Dekker Linnros, Simon LU (2026) STVM25 20252
Department of Political Science
Abstract
In 2024 the European Declaration of Cycling was signed as a tri-institutional declaration by the European Commission, Council of the European Union and the European Parliament. For the first time, cycling was acknowledged as a fully fledged mode of transport in a EU-level framework and through it, cycling now sits officially on the agenda of the EU. Yet this level of political attention was for many unthinkable just a few years ago and interest groups had prior to the declaration lobbied for multiple years without success. This thesis views cycling’s rise to the EU-agenda as a successful case of agenda-setting, and seeks to explain how cycling could go from a quintessential local issue to the corridors of Brussels.
By adopting the... (More)
In 2024 the European Declaration of Cycling was signed as a tri-institutional declaration by the European Commission, Council of the European Union and the European Parliament. For the first time, cycling was acknowledged as a fully fledged mode of transport in a EU-level framework and through it, cycling now sits officially on the agenda of the EU. Yet this level of political attention was for many unthinkable just a few years ago and interest groups had prior to the declaration lobbied for multiple years without success. This thesis views cycling’s rise to the EU-agenda as a successful case of agenda-setting, and seeks to explain how cycling could go from a quintessential local issue to the corridors of Brussels.
By adopting the agenda-setting framework developed by Kingdon in combination with recent literature on interest-groups, this thesis explores the underlying conditions enabling this development as well as the agency of interest groups. Through the conduction of a deductive theory-guided process tracing I develop a causal explanation of the agenda-setting process. The thesis finds that attention brought to urban mobility by Covid-19 in combination with a new political landscape following the green deal created favorable conditions for agenda change, which interest groups exploited through detailed strategies and access to key decision-makers. (Less)
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author
Dekker Linnros, Simon LU
supervisor
organization
course
STVM25 20252
year
type
H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
subject
keywords
multiple streams framework, agenda-setting, interest groups, the European Union, cycling policy
language
English
id
9217221
date added to LUP
2026-01-26 16:15:33
date last changed
2026-01-26 16:15:33
@misc{9217221,
  abstract     = {{In 2024 the European Declaration of Cycling was signed as a tri-institutional declaration by the European Commission, Council of the European Union and the European Parliament. For the first time, cycling was acknowledged as a fully fledged mode of transport in a EU-level framework and through it, cycling now sits officially on the agenda of the EU. Yet this level of political attention was for many unthinkable just a few years ago and interest groups had prior to the declaration lobbied for multiple years without success. This thesis views cycling’s rise to the EU-agenda as a successful case of agenda-setting, and seeks to explain how cycling could go from a quintessential local issue to the corridors of Brussels. 
By adopting the agenda-setting framework developed by Kingdon in combination with recent literature on interest-groups, this thesis explores the underlying conditions enabling this development as well as the agency of interest groups. Through the conduction of a deductive theory-guided process tracing I develop a causal explanation of the agenda-setting process. The thesis finds that attention brought to urban mobility by Covid-19 in combination with a new political landscape following the green deal created favorable conditions for agenda change, which interest groups exploited through detailed strategies and access to key decision-makers.}},
  author       = {{Dekker Linnros, Simon}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{How Cycling Rode to the European Agenda}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}