This article analyses whether the European Union’s (EU) Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) has been underpinned by a policy paradigm. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to the debate on the existence and importance of paradigms in policy-making. It uses a causal mapping technique to reconstruct the beliefs behind three key policy documents in the SGP’s development, assessing to what extent these beliefs conform to two dominant economic policy paradigms. The analysis shows that the policy beliefs behind the SGP have been a mixture of economic policy paradigms, in which the emphasis placed on each paradigm has changed over time. This implies that internally coherent mixtures of policy paradigms are possible. This is likely also to be the case in many other areas of (EU) policy-making. Our findings have important implications for the debate on policy-change, as they suggest that paradigmatic change is likely to proceed more through gradual changes within mixes of paradigms than through radical paradigm shifts.

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I would like to thank my research-assistants Marij Swinkels and Hidde van Overvest for their help with the data collection and analysis, as well as Social Science Automation for the use of Profiler Plus and Worldview.

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