Morten Egeberg

Transcending intergovernmentalism? Identity and role perceptions of national officials in EU decision-making

Focusing on the identity and role perceptions of national officials in EU policy-making, intergovernmentalism may be transcended in two different ways. First, as asserted by neo-functionalists, national elites may shift their loyalty from a national to a supranational level owing to the effect of EU institutions. Second, as could perhaps be interpreted as the argument of the functionalists, functional role orientations acquired in sectoral ministries and specialized agencies at the national level may be sustained in the cross-border interactions of national officials. Based on an organizational and institutional perspective, the identity and role conceptions, and their conditions, are analysed by applying interview data from forty-seven national transport ministry officials in five small member states.

The Impact of Bureaucratic Structure on Policy Making

Students of public administration have often focused on behaviour and attitudes without relating them explicitly to bureaucratic structure. They have also concentrated on structural descriptions, and on reorganization processes. These steps are, beyond doubt, necessary and important. However, connecting structure and policy making in order to learn about the consequences of alternative arrangements can be assumed to be the ultimate concern of academics as well as of practitioners. The relationship between formal structure and actual decision behaviour is an issue of enduring theoretical interest. At the same time, insights into how organizational change might affect policy-making and performance are crucial for most high-level officials. I will proceed by identifying theoretical components that assign a role to the formal administrative structure in this respect. The empirical studies I draw on are mainly confined to research on central government bureaucracies at the national level, and how their structures affect substantive policy making

EU-level agencies: new executive centre formation or vehicles for national control?

The jury is still out with respect to whether European Union (EU)-level agencies act primarily as tools of national governments or not, although parts of the literature as well as the legal framework of EU agencies seem to favour the former interpretation. We argue that EU agencies which might be able to act relatively independently of national governments and the Council, but not necessarily independently from the Commission, would contribute to executive centre formation at the European level and thus to further transformation of the current political-administrative order. By measuring along several dimensions, we demonstrate that the Commission constitutes by far the most important partner of EU agencies. EU agencies deal (somewhat surprisingly) to a considerable extent with (quasi-) regulatory and politicized issues. When engaging in such areas, national ministries and the Council tend to strengthen their position, however, not to the detriment of the Commission. In addition to the Commission, national agencies make up the closest interlocutors in the daily life of EU agencies, indicating how EU-level agencies become building blocks in a multilevel Union administration, partly bypassing national ministries. We build our analysis on an on-line survey among senior officials in EU agencies.

How federal? The organizational dimension of integration in the EU (and elsewhere)

To figure out what kind of polity the EU is developing into, contending approaches to European integration apply quite different criteria. This article argues that the new institutional perspective could be strengthened considerably by specifying the organizational principles embodied in a given institutional structure. If the task is to integrate sub-territories, a highly integrated system is, in organizational terms, a system in which non-territorial organizational components have taken precedence over territorial ones at the centre. Thus, sub-territories as such are only marginally reflected in the organizational set-up at the centre. This organizational conceptualization provides a frame of reference within which reform efforts and actual changes in the EU over time are interpreted. By examining the behavioural consequences of different organizing principles, it becomes relatively clear that the extent to which decision-makers might be resocialized at the EU level is highly contingent upon an institutions organizational characteristics.

Parliament staff: unpacking the behaviour of officials in the European Parliament

Officials within parliaments have received marginal scholarly attention. This also holds for the European Parliament (EP) which contains a considerable administration. This study, based on an online survey (N = 118), shows that political group staff are primarily committed to the concerns of their respective political groups, but also to the arguments of those external actors which have similar party affiliation. Since most group officials are, in addition, affiliated to a particular committee, they also emphasize sectoral interests, including the concerns of affected interest groups. EP secretariat officials, on the other hand, give priority to sectoral and expert concerns. Both groups of staff rank European concerns above national ones, and pay more attention to the arguments of the European Commission than to the arguments of any other institution. This study thus suggests that officials in the EP contribute to the spanning of ideological and sectoral cleavages across European Union institutions. These observations may be seen as deviating from a basically intergovernmental portrayal of the Union.

Europe’s Executive Branch of Government in the Melting Pot: an Overview

National governments have for more than a hundred years had to deal with a multitude of international governmental organizations (IGOs). In this respect governments have striven for coordination in order to be able to present their national positions as coherently as possible on the international scene. They have also been supposed to implement carefully what has been agreed upon in these forums. The development of the European Union (EU) and its predecessors has without doubt added considerably to these tasks: its extraordinarily broad and expanding policy agenda has significantly challenged the ability of national governments to act consistently on the European scene (Kassim et al. 2000), and the huge amount of EU-generated legislation to be implemented has put national administrations, although to varying degrees, under unprecedented pressure (Knill 2001; Sverdrup 2004).

A Not So Technocratic Executive? Everyday Interaction between the European Parliament and the Commission

The European Commission, although generally portrayed as a technocratic, non-majoritarian institution, or as an agent of EU member governments, has become increasingly linked to the European Parliament (EP) through a range of semi-parliamentary measures intended to increase the executive’s legitimacy and accountability. In this article we argue that in addition to several highly visible and often treaty-based control instruments, an almost symbiotic, less visible, routine relationship can be observed between the two institutions. Based on an online survey of EP staff, as well as on minutes from EP committee meetings, this article examines the daily interaction taking place between the Commission and the EP, particularly at the level of officials. Although mutual interdependence in the legislative process may trigger daily interaction, the theoretical argument proposed is that the latter is facilitated and reinforced under two particular conditions: (i) if the two institutions share similar organisational patterns, and (ii) if they share similar behavioural patterns. Three such patterns are emphasised: sectoral, ideological and supranational.

European Government(s): Executive Politics in Transition?

This article starts by discussing ‘agencification’ and fragmentation in national governments. When dealing with the problems that these developments might cause for democratic control and agency accountability, one only tends to look at the relationships between agencies and various national stakeholders, in particular ministerial departments. Has a ‘methodological nationalism’ hindered us from seeing the emerging executive centre at the level above, i.e. the European Commission, and the re-coupling of nationally decoupled agencies into a multilevel Union administration? The development of the EU, due to its peculiar institutional architecture, takes quite another direction than intergovernmental cooperation and comes to challenge governments in an unprecedented way. National agencies become parts of two administrations – a national as well as a Union administration.

Balancing Autonomy and Accountability: Enduring Tensions in the European Commission’s Development

The existence of the European Commission is arguably the most peculiar component in the institutional architecture of the European Union (EU). While councils, parliamentary assemblies and courts may be found in governance structures at the international level as well, a separate executive body like the Commission is not in place anywhere else. The Commission and its predecessor, the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), were deliberately designed as engines of integration. They were to inject genuine European interests into the policy-making processes of the Community. To be able to fulfil this task, they had to be organized independently of the Council and the member governments, and have their own political leadership: the College of Commissioners.

EU Committee Governance between Intergovernmental and Union Administration

Committees are an essential part of the functioning of modern governance. Some committees are official, whilst others are unofficial or even ad hoc. They play a crucial role in the daily operation of the European Union (EU) system of governance by providing expertise in policy development and decision-making, by linking member states’ governments and administrations with the EU level and by increasing the acceptance of European laws and programmes in the member states. EU committees are important arenas for EU governance as well as melting pots of national and supranational government systems. In various guises, committees are active at every stage of the political process within the EU machinery — assisting the Commission in drafting legislation, preparing the dossiers on which the Council takes decisions and supervising the implementation of EC law by the Commission. The latter are generally referred to as comitology committees, although the term is sometimes extended to include all committees (Christiansen and Kirchner 2000).