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When dealing with EU's rule of law (RoL)-related issues, the Commission has often adopted a forbearance approach and the actions taken have crystallised in soft enforcement mechanisms directed at Poland. However, the use of the Conditionality Regulation as an enforcement instrument in 2022 in relation to (lack of) RoL compliance signalled a change into an assertive approach towards Hungary. Why so? This paper argues that exogenous events may change policy priorities and linkage of issues explain this change. Russian aggression against Ukraine prompted a shift in the priorities of member states' governments making them more receptive towards EU Commission enforcement actions. The Hungarian government's friendly attitude towards Russia clashes with the position of most member states and the Commission itself. Orban's partial isolation makes the Commission more willing to exercise RoL enforcement initiatives. Hence, supranational RoL-related forbearance is, at least in critical situations, affected by the calculus of opportunity that the Commission derives from other policy areas. Empirically, the process is traced through official/public documents and statements made by EU actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Kingdon's Multiple Stream Approach, the article analyses the political dynamics that led to the introduction of the Strategic Compass, which gained prominence in the context of the Russian war in Ukraine. Due to its comprehensiveness and adoption at the highest political level – the European Council – the study considers the Compass a manifestation of policy change. Assuming that change in EU security policy originates from various sources, the article identifies Germany, France, the High Representative, and the European Commission as potential policy entrepreneurs. By examining their entrepreneurial strategies, it traces their footprint on policy change. The analysis reveals a particularly strong influence of French diplomacy on the process of shaping the Compass and points to the key role of the High Representative, despite the institutional constraints of the office. The article also highlights the usefulness of MSA for studying foreign policy change and, in particular, the dynamics between entrepreneurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how nationality and partisanship, two personal attributes of Commissioners, influence member states' bargaining success in EU law making. Building on principal-agent theory, it is expected that countries with close national and political linkages to the Commissioner responsible for negotiating a proposal are more successful in attaining their preferred outcomes. The hypotheses are tested using a linear regression model on the DEUIII dataset. Overall, the analysis demonstrates that a state has more bargaining success when the responsible Commissioner comes from that state or is affiliated with the same European Parliament party group as one of the governing parties in that state. Moreover, shared national ties moderate the detrimental effect of preference disagreements with the Commission on states' success. The study contributes to the literature by showing that Commissioners are not independent but political actors who can act autonomously and successfully pursue the preferences of their home countries and parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Treaty of Lisbon’s institutional modifications narrowed the options for member states within the formal decision-making rules, mainly due to the broadening of the ordinary legislative procedure. This paper hypothesises that the actors in EU institutions seek to strengthen their influence through coordination across the EU legislative institutions, along either national or political party lines. The research data consist of co-decision files that include information on the national and political identities of all the relevant actors in the legislative process in 2004–2011. Statistical tests assess the likelihood of changes in the dynamics of the legislative process as related to the affiliation of the actors after Lisbon. The results show a clear difference in the post-Lisbon legislative process, indicating that the political party identity of the actors may play a more significant role, although other factors must be considered as well. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The European Union’s system of delegated powers, ‘comitology’, underwent significant changes after the Lisbon Treaty entered into force. This paper assesses the impact of these changes on the European Parliament, European Commission and Council. It distinguishes between the changes that occurred at the level of treaty reform (which generally favoured the EP in assuming a greater role in the process of policy-implementation) and subsequent legislative reforms and developments in soft law (through which the Council and the European Commission have reasserted their powers). While the system of delegated powers has significantly changed through the Lisbon reforms, it falls short of the expectations and intentions that led to these changes. The key objectives behind the reform – a simplification of a highly complex system of centralised policy implementation and greater democratic accountability through an upgrading of the EP’s role – have only partially been achieved. To some extent recent developments indicate a step back. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Who provides the European Union with information? This article examines patterns of participation in the large expert group system under the European Commission. It explores competing propositions about the character of the Commission's information system, and tests four hypotheses about what affects participation in the EU expert group system. The authors distinguish between three kinds of information providers: scientists, societal actors and government officials. The empirical section of the paper builds upon an analysis of a data set covering all of the Commission expert groups (N = 1237). Although scientists, and interest groups, industries and NGOs are prevalent information providers for the Commission, the authors show that the informational foundation is strongly biased towards officials from national administrations. They argue that these distinct patterns of participation are significantly affected by inter-institutional and environmental conditions that the Commission Directorate Generals operate under. Access of experts increases the ability of the Commission to anticipate reactions to its proposals and initiatives and hence it impinges on the inter-institutional dynamic of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic accountability system of the European Commission has changed over the last decade. New structures and rules with a range of ex ante constraints and ex post incentives have combined to provide a system for more control and accountability in and over the Commission. This paper uses two concepts of accountability - a passive and an active one - to analyse the modernisation of accountability at the top of the European Commission. Drawing on documentary evidence of politics during the Prodi (1999-2004) and Barroso I years (2004-09) and on interviews held with senior Commission officials during the Barroso incumbency, it shows how strengthened accountability mechanisms and a shift in the dominant types of accountability have characterised the modernisation of the Commission's executive accountability system. In addition to legal and professional accountability systems, an elaborate mixture of accountability mechanisms was created that stressed political and bureaucratic mechanisms and that have created new expectations of accountability on the part of commissioners and their senior officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the increasing relevance of Islam and religion in the institutional arrangement of the EU post-Maastricht and the future policy implications for the complex political system of the EU. By adopting a combination of qualitative methodologies that are theoretically rooted in historical institutionalism and in a systemic view of the EU, the paper studies the emergence of Islam and religion as policy issues in two institutional settings, the European Commission and the European Parliament, during the 1990s and up to the first decade of the twenty-first century. The analysis shows a growing attention to faith communities on the part of the Commission, in the post-Maastricht context, culminating in the elaboration of semi-official avenues for encounter and dialogue with religious groups. It also indicates how, in turn, these semi-official practices and the ideas behind them have gradually imposed themselves upon multiple levels of the EU political system, thus opening up an institutional space in the EU for consultations with and 'informal policies' towards faith communities, both within and outside the EU borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how the EU regulatory state expands into fiscal surveillance and what conflicts arise in the process. That the EU should have gone down the route of regulating budgets is puzzling. In Majone's original concept, the regulatory state is meant not to interfere with member states' budgetary redistributive policies. Yet the revision of the Pact strengthened the regulatory content of fiscal surveillance by reformulating the policy problem, strengthening delegated monitoring by the Commission, with Eurostat rather than DG Ecfin at its helm, and by extending control through specialised information. The analysis implies that the revision of the Pact in March 2005 cannot simply be dismissed as a watering down of its fiscal rules. However, there are limitations to regulatory expansion. One limitation is the inherent tension between the requirements of control and the economic justification of fiscal rules, another that economic justifications remain ambiguous and contentious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European state aid control, a part of competition policy, typically follows the logic of negative integration. It constrains the potential for member states to distort competition by reducing their ability to subsidise industry. In addition, this paper argues, ambiguous Treaty rules and heterogeneous member state preferences have enabled the European Commission to act as a supranational entrepreneur, not only enforcing the prohibition of distortive state aid, but also developing its own vision of 'good' state aid policy. In order to prevent or to settle political conflict about individual decisions, the Commission has sought to establish more general criteria for the state aid that it still deems admissible. These criteria have been codified into a complex system of soft law and, more recently, hard state aid law. The Commission has thus created positive integration 'from above' and increasingly influences the objectives of national state aid policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an ideational perspective of new institutional leadership and applies it to the European Commission's role in the policy process concerning the European Union (EU)-Turkey cooperation on migration from 2014 to 2016. On a conceptual and methodological level, through searching for evidence of the causal mechanism of 'strategic framing', the article traces how the Commission deployed its ideas in the different phases of the policy-making process. This contribution feeds into the claim for new institutional leadership by revealing how such ideas shaped some of the main policy outcomes in the EU–Turkey cooperation during the refugee crisis. The ideational perspective of new institutional leadership also suggests that the Juncker Commission's 'strategic framing' was part of the EU's broader principled realism philosophy that led the Commission to take some contestable political choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have extensively studied how the European Court of Justice (ECJ) interacts with Member State courts. The ECJ's behaviour vis-à-vis international tribunals remains, however, underexplored despite its salience for EU global actorness. The ECJ does at times condone and at other times reject cooperation with international tribunals in that it either authorises or prohibits EU and Member State participation in relevant regimes. What drives ECJ behaviour? While intuitive, European law fails to fully account for it. This study draws on models of bounded discretion to explain ECJ behaviour in external judicial politics. It argues that two factors – namely jurisdictional overlap between the European legal order and international tribunals as well as the centrality of these tribunals in global governance – decisively influence the preferences of the ECJ, Member States, the European Commission and Parliament and thus delimit the range of politically viable rulings and shape ECJ behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the paradox of constructive ambiguity. Based on a focused, longitudinal comparison of the European Union’s energy and defence policies, it analyses the role played by strategies of ambiguity in European integration. Ambiguity is found to be an attractive strategy for political entrepreneurs when member state preferences are heterogeneous and the EU’s legal basis is weak. It is likely to be effective, however, only if it is embedded in an institutional opportunity structure – that is, a formal-legal context – that entrepreneurs can fold into their strategic repertoire of ideas. While ambiguity can be strategic in circumstances where clarity would create strong opposition, it is not sufficient to entrench a European policy if it does not rest on an institutional basis. This suggests that European political entrepreneurs should be wary of relying on coalition building by ambiguity only. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the European context, the Commission is responsible for monitoring and enforcing states' compliance with EU legislation. However, the Commission often entrusts external actors to monitor and assess implementation. To what extent does the Commission withhold, partially or fully disclose compliance assessments? Drawing on reputational accounts of bureaucratic performance, it is expected that the Commission is confronted with competing incentives. On the one hand, the Commission needs to justify enforcement decisions based on expert evaluations. On the other hand, disseminating information about non-compliance could exacerbate relations with the member states and threatens to damage the Commission's unique reputation as the main guardian of the EU treaties. Employing a novel data-set on the transparency of compliance assessments, it is found that the Commission discloses compliance assessments prepared by highly competent external actors only partially. The finding raises concerns about the extent to which wider audiences are sufficiently informed about national implementation outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant view in the literature depicts the modernisation of the antitrust rules and the reform of the Merger Regulation as a struggle for control between the European Commission and the member states, from which the Commission emerged triumphant. This article rejects this 'power politics' interpretation, arguing that its proponents misrepresent the reform process, overstate the power of the Commission, and overlook the wider ideational context that influences competition law and policy. Drawing on original research conducted by the authors, it argues that a regulatory processes perspective is more sensitive to the dynamics of decision-making and policy change in this key area. Re-interpreting the two reforms, it demonstrates that more was at play than a simple power struggle between the Commission and the member states, that the reforms were influenced by an international expert community, and that the outcome was shaped by classic techniques of regulatory conflict management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diagnosis of the transformation of executive governance in Europe should incorporate the diverse dynamics of EU-level agencies. Recent years have witnessed comprehensive reform efforts in the European Commission aimed partly at increasing institutional effectiveness and efficiency. One constituent ingredient thereof has been the institution of non-majoritarian EU-level agencies with regulatory and non-regulatory discretionary competences beneath the Community institutions. This article conceptualises theoretically and explores empirically three complementary images of agency governance in the EU. Based on a rich body of survey (N = 265) and interview (N = 29) data among three regulatory and four non-regulatory EU-level agencies, the article demonstrates that EU-level agencies tend to combine the roles as autonomous administrative spaces, multilevel epistemic networks and Community institutions. EU-level regulatory and non-regulatory agencies blend all three images of agency governance. This article thus demonstrates that agency governance is only marginally affected by the regulatory-non-regulatory dichotomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trilogues have been studied as sites of secluded inter-institutional decision making that gather the Council of the European Union, the European Parliament (EP) and the European Commission. Trilogues, however, are not exempt from formal and informal party-political dynamics that affect intra- and inter-institutional contestation. The increase in Eurosceptics in the 2014 EP elections offers an opportunity to investigate their efforts to shape the position and behaviour of the EP negotiating team in trilogues. Therefore, this article investigates to what extent Eurosceptic party groups participate in trilogue negotiations and how mainstream groups deal with their presence. The analysis shows that the opportunities to participate in trilogues and shape the EP's position are higher for those perceived as soft Eurosceptic MEPs, while mainstream groups apply a 'cordon sanitaire' to those perceived as being part of hard Eurosceptic groups - which reduces the chances of MEPs from those groups being willing to participate in parliamentary work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at systematically analysing the European Commission’s effort to enforce compliance with the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). In recent years, human rights organisations have increasingly denounced EU member states’ violations of the right to asylum and accused the EU of turning a blind eye to non-compliance with the CEAS. Although the primary responsibility to implement EU law lies with member states, the Commission ought to assist them and enforce violated legislation. How exactly does the Commission react to member states’ non-compliance with the CEAS? What can be inferred from these insights? By using infringement data, policy documents, and complementary interviews, the article scrutinises which of the available instruments are applied de facto. Subsequently, the findings are critically discussed, suggesting that the Commission prefers capacity-enhancing instruments and is rather tentative in using instruments to increase member states’ willingness to comply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Commission is frequently faced with leaks, much like other public administrations in Western democracies. While executive leaders often criticise the practice of leaking as an unwanted breach of confidentiality and secrecy, leak prevention is usually not taken seriously compared to the scale of the phenomenon. This article discusses leaking and leak prevention more broadly and analyses the efforts of the European Commission to prevent leaks. It finds that leaking and leak prevention were regularly discussed at the highest level of the EU’s executive between 2006 and 2015. However, few Commission officials have been sanctioned for leaking in that period, and mostly for leaks that appear unrelated to the substance of those discussed at the political level. This mismatch is explained by a decoupling of talk and action regarding leak prevention, allowing the European Commission and other public administrations to manage inconsistencies in competing internal and external demands for openness and confidentiality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intensification of the financial and economic crisis in Europe has added a new impetus to the debate over the possibilities for securing supranational fiscal integration within the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Since the literature on the European Union’s response to the crisis is dominated by the study of intergovernmental politics, this article considers the previously neglected role of the Commission. A framing analysis of the Commission’s crisis discourse is operationalised here, which is supplemented by interviews with senior officials located in the Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN) during key phases of the crisis. It is found that a supranational reform agenda was never internalised by the Commission. Instead, the Commission acted strategically by framing the crisis around intergovernmental fiscal discipline. These findings suggest that, in line with the ‘new intergovernmentalist’ thesis, supranational institutions themselves may not be as ‘hard-wired’ towards supranationalism as is often assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How do national members react to performance failures of EU-level interest groups? Albert Hirschman suggested two responses: exit and voice. Building on this distinction, the article develops the category of selective exit which denotes members' interest representation outside the boundaries of the EU-level interest organisation in response to performance failures. Selective exit enables members to raise voice from within and exert pressure from outside the group. The empirical test of this proposition draws on 100 interviews with national interest groups which provide evidence on the lobbying performance of EU-level groups on 20 EU directive proposals. Exact logistic regressions analyse their responses to the quality of information supply by the EU-level group and the congruence of their preferences with the EU-level group's common position. The findings demonstrate that members join coalitions and participate in media debates to counter perceived performance failures. The conclusion summarises the findings and points out avenues for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under pressure to open up the ‘black box’ of governance, technocratic bodies are increasingly seeking to include civil society participation in the policy process. This article draws on empirical cases from the European Commission and NHS England to assess the extent to which the participatory mechanisms pursued by these institutions have been successful in eliciting ‘throughput legitimacy’. It is shown that though these mechanisms have taken very different forms – the former a classic instance of ‘window dressing’ participation, the latter closer to ‘best practice’ in this field – they nevertheless share a number of ongoing vulnerabilities. The article outlines the shared organisational, operational and existential dilemmas that technocratic bodies face when eliciting civil society participation, and highlight their reliance on backstage negotiation to sustain stakeholder buy-in. It concludes by highlighting the prospect that the pursuit of throughput legitimacy for technocratic bodies entails inherent limitations and contradictions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the ways in which EU actors have engaged in incremental changes to the eurozone rules ‘by stealth’ ‒ that is, by reinterpreting the rules and recalibrating the numbers without admitting it in their public discourse. Using the methodological framework of discursive institutionalism to focus on agents’ ideas and discursive interactions in institutional context, the article links EU actors’ reinterpretation of rules to their efforts to ensure greater legitimacy in terms of policy performance and governance processes as well as citizen politics. Using the normative theoretical framework of EU democratic systems theory, it analyses EU actors’ considerations of legitimacy not only in terms of their policies’ ‘output’ performance and citizens’ political ‘input’ but also the ‘throughput’ quality of their governance processes. The article illustrates this by elaborating on the different pathways to legitimation of the European Central Bank and the European Commission. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The appointment of the President of the European Commission in 2014 occurred in the context of a novel environment: in constitutional terms, the Lisbon Treaty had introduced a small but significant change, namely the requirement for the candidate proposed by the European Council to be elected by the European Parliament. Politically, the 2014 European elections took place against the background of the eurozone crisis which had polarised opinions about the direction of European integration across the member states. This article develops a framework to assess the impact of this changed environment along two crucial dimensions of EU politics – interinstitutional relations and party politics. Based on this analysis, the article argues that while there has been gradual change in certain respects, the impact of theSpitzenkandidatensystem did not lead to a transformation of the EU’s political system. Indeed, rather than creating new opportunities for party political competition, the cooperation between centre-right and centre-left in the election of the Commission President and subsequent decision-making further strengthened the long-standing ‘grand coalition’ in the European Parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the debate about the impact of the eurozone crisis on the EU’s institutional balance, antagonists have often argued past each other. Supporters of the new intergovernmentalism contend that the European Council has supplanted the European Commission in policy leadership, while scholars who hold that the EU executive has been a winner of the crisis highlight the new management functions it has acquired. This article argues, first, that an accurate assessment of the institutional balance requires a more global evaluation of the Commission, acknowledging external and internal dynamics. Second, it contends that the crisis did not cause a Commission retreat but accelerated a process already underway that finds its origins in the presidentialisation of policy control. The adoption of fewer legislative proposals during the crisis was due to the ability and choice of a strong president to focus the attention on crisis-related areas. The broader lesson is that rather than marking a further step in the decline of the Commission, the crisis reveals how the centralisation of power within the institution and its expanded management duties have enhanced its capacity to take strategic action. The Commission’s role as an engine of integration will therefore endure, but in a different guise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the political dynamics behind Europe’s new banking union in two stages. First it examines the accretion of political power to two European institutions – the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) – during the financial crisis, emphasising the ways in which the European Central Bank (especially under Mario Draghi) altered the relationship between principals and agents in the European institutional architecture. Second, it process-traces the policy conflicts and compromises that led to a Europeanisation and centralisation of bank supervision, recapitalisation, recovery and resolution in a remarkably short two years – a transfer in sovereignty to the supranational level equal to that involved in the creation of Economic and Monetary Union. The article argues, contrary to other analyses that stress the intergovernmental nature of the process and the bargains concluded, that the emergence of banking union reflected something of a neo-functionalist logic whereby supranational actors successfully interpreted the crisis as requiring supranational solutions, and shaped the outcomes in the face of sometimes fierce member state opposition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bank ring-fencing is an important post-crisis regulatory response to the moral hazard dilemma surrounding too-big-to-fail banks. Since national governments bore the worst of the costs of rescuing the largest banks, it is reasonable to expect that the authorities would have the greatest incentive to promote tough ring-fence reform. However, in confrontation with the EU’s Liikanen Group and the EU Commission, France and Germany established a weaker set of national reforms. This article asks why these national governments pursued legislation that was more accommodating to their largest banks than the EU proposals. It argues that France and Germany were defending market-based banking in their largest universal banks. They were defending the ability of their largest banks to hold large volumes of trading assets which, in the view of the EU Commission and others, was a major cause of the financial crisis. The conclusions suggest that the direction of change will continue to be towards further market-based banking, despite the associated costs revealed by the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how the European Commission has responded to external criticism and demands for the democratisation and reform of the way it uses expert groups in EU policy making. The article analyses the nature and character of the Commission’s dialogue with its critics and the degree and extent to which it was prepared to adapt its existing internal processes and procedures to the reform agenda. Recent theories inform us that organisations respond in different ways to external criticism and demands for reform, including full adaptation, evasion, institutional decoupling and reinterpretation. The main findings suggest that the Commission was not completely resistant to changing its approach to the use of expertise. The Commission reinterpreted its critics’ demands by introducing reforms that defused this external pressure, while protecting the effectiveness of its existing internal ideology and processes. These findings serve to enhance the Commission’s image as an increasingly normalised bureaucracy and reinforce the importance of knowledge and expertise as a key source of Commission legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The introduction of a provision in the Lisbon Treaty allowing European Union institutions to forge binding inter-institutional agreements (IIAs) draws attention to the limited research that exists on these instruments of EU governance. This article contributes to the development of this literature by presenting empirical evidence on two cases of decision-making on IIAs: on lobby regulation; and on the regulation of the conduct of EU public servants. In the first case the proposed IIA was successfully concluded; in the second, it was not. In contrasting these cases this article explains these differing outcomes with reference to the relevance of shared inter-institutional values and the mutual benefits of agreement. The findings suggest that both shared values and mutual interests are likely to be important in shaping successful IIA decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the past two decades, reliance on short-term contracted staff has increased in government institutions across the Western world. This tendency towards ‘contracted government’ may be strengthened during periods of economic and financial stress. This article therefore poses the following questions: First, does ‘contracted government’ lead to civil servants less loyal and attentive to the concerns of ‘their’ government institutions? Secondly, and more generally, what factors shape the behavioural perceptions of contracted government staff? Benefiting from a new, full-scale survey among seconded national experts in the European Commission, this study shows that contracted Commission staff are largely integrated and committed to the Commission and its administrative sub-units. The general lesson learned is that when under contract, contracted personnel seem mainly loyal and attentive to the concerns of the government institution under which they formally serve. This finding dispels fears that contracted government officials may serve several masters. Theoretically, the behavioural perceptions of contracted Commission officials are explained with reference to their primary organisational affiliation towards the Commission and its sub-units, as well as by the internal organisational composition of the Commission services. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Does lobbying success in the European Union vary systematically across interest group type? Interest groups lobby the European institutions in order to achieve policy decisions that are in line with their own preferences. While some argue that different types of interest groups are equally able to shape European policy-making, others contend that lobbying success is systematically biased towards some powerful interest groups. The empirical evidence is contradictory as previous studies focused either on a specific interest group type or on a specific policy area so that it is difficult to draw general conclusions. This study therefore presents an extensive empirical analysis of lobbying success across a wide variety of interest groups and policy issues by combining a quantitative text analysis of Commission consultations with an online survey among interest groups. The findings are promising as they indicate that lobbying success does not vary systematically across interest group type. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information supply is an important instrument through which interest groups can exert influence on political decisions. However, information supply to decision-makers varies extensively across interest groups despite the common objective to influence policy-making. Drawing on resource mobilisation and organisational theory, a new theoretical framework is developed that identifies organisational characteristics, more specifically the resources, the functional differentiation, the professionalisation and the decentralisation of interest groups as determinants of information supply. These theoretical expectations are tested based on a large new dataset. Using multilevel modelling, this article examines information supply to the European Commission across a large number of policy issues and interest groups by combining an analysis of consultation submissions with a survey conducted among interest groups. The findings confirm the theoretical expectations suggesting that interest groups cannot equally exploit their access to decision-makers, but that resource endowment and organisational structures play a crucial role for effective informational lobbying. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the politics behind the design of EU regulatory institutions. The EU has established an extensive 'Eurocracy' outside of the Commission hierarchy, including over 30 European agencies and a number of networks of national regulatory authorities (NRAs). The article examines the politics of institutional choice in the EU, explaining why EU policy-makers create agencies in some policy areas, while opting for looser regulatory networks in others. It shows that the design of EU regulatory institutions - 'the Eurocracy' - is driven not by functional imperatives but by political considerations related to distributional conflict and the influence of supranational actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to a growing literature on international bureaucracy by exploring the relationship between bureaucratic structure and administrative behaviour. The ambition of this study is twofold: first, it explores the extent to which international bureaucracies combine two inherent behavioural logics: a logic of hierarchy and a logic of portfolio. Second, two key empirical lessons are used to modify four conventional claims in existing research. Drawing on a rich body of data from three international bureaucracies (the European Commission, the OECD Secretariat, and the WTO Secretariat), this study suggests that administrative behaviour among international civil servants is profoundly shaped by the bureaucratic structures of international bureaucracies. Variation in the abovementioned behavioural logics is conditioned by two aspects of bureaucratic structure: First, the accumulation of relevant organisational capacities at the executive centre of international bureaucracies, and second, the vertical and horizontal specialisation of international bureaucracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The delegation of policy-making tasks to EU agencies and their remarkable growth in number over the past two decades mark a striking new development in the EU's institutional make-up. While most of the nascent literature on the EU's 'agencification' addresses the conditions for agency creation and the implications of agency governance from the perspective of democratic accountability, there is a lack of empirical research systematically scrutinising the institutional structure and degree of formal-institutional independence of these agencies. This article offers a comprehensive empirical assessment and measure of the variation in institutional independence displayed by the entire set of 29 EU agencies operating under the EU's three pillars and tests hypotheses explaining variation in formal independence among agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past, economic integration in Europe was largely compatible with the preservation of different national varieties of capitalism. While product market integration intensified competition, member states could build on and foster their respective comparative advantage. Today, this no longer unequivocally holds true. This article contends that a new, 'post-Ricardian' phase of European integration has emerged in which the Commission's and the European Court of Justice's (ECJ's) attempts to promote economic integration systematically challenge the institutions of organised capitalism. It demonstrates this by discussing recent disputes over the Services Directive, the Takeover Directive, and company law. In the current phase of European integration, the Commission's and the ECJ's liberalisation attempts either transform the institutional foundations on which some of the member states' economic systems rely or they create political resistance to an extent that challenges the viability of the European project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Commission has developed an analysis of supplementary pensions which constructs the policy area as regulatory by separating 'allocative' issues, such as smoothing lifetime income and promoting saving, from traditional 'redistributive' or 'budgetary' welfare concerns, such as ensuring an adequate minimum income. In the allocative sphere, it promotes market-oriented values, notably 'actuarial fairness'. However, the progress of European measures on supplementary pensions is impeded by alternative approaches. The social partners play a large role in regulating supplementary pensions, and they provide an approach to regulation that is antagonistic to the adoption of common EU rules. Member states might be expected to view EU-level regulatory activity more favourably as providing a lever for pension reforms, but several states which had already embarked on substantial changes to their pension systems did not welcome EU-led reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discussion of the Services Directive from 2004 onwards showed an unprecedented extent of politicisation of a single-market issue. Coinciding with the Eastern enlargement in 2004, the easing of the services freedom through the Directive raised significant redistributive issues, given the differences in labour costs. The article analyses why mutual recognition is so controversial in services, by contrast with its acceptance in developing the internal market in goods. It is shown that the problem of trust in the regulatory systems of other member states that arises under mutual recognition is being addressed through administrative cooperation, but the problem of inequality between workers that arises from the application of home country regulations has not been resolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare regulation in the European Union continues to crawl forward despite salient conflicts of interests. This article addresses the fundamental puzzle of how regulatory competences may expand into the core of the welfare state and how conflicts are, eventually, managed in such processes. It analyses the EU cross-border provision of healthcare services and argues that the interplay between the Commission and the Court constitutes a powerful dynamic in generating new regulatory activities and in finding ways to set conflicts aside. The Commission draws on formulations offered by the Court in finding ways to manage conflict, for example, by requiring 'proportionate' national policies which establish that national obstacles to free movement principles are 'objectively necessary'. The article concludes that law and evidence-based policy-making serve as powerful resources for the Commission in managing conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the politics of the Lisbon strategy before and after its major watershed reform in 2005, with particular attention to the role of the European Commission. Operating in an ambiguous partial delegation of power, the Commission changed from performing a strong administrative role in the 2000-04 period to performing a political role after 2005. The institutional analysis of this article combines contextual factors and internal factors for explaining this variation. The findings reveal that although internal factors play an important part in explaining change, they are highly related to contextual factors. More precisely, the ability of the Commission to unfold actively its ideological and normative leverage and unfold specific forms of procedural leverage after 2005 is highly related to the member states' decision to clarify the formal division of tasks between them and the Commission. In other words, situations of procedural ambiguity are not necessarily to the advantage of the Commission, since it does not invariably have the ability to use this ambiguity in its favour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1999, the European Commission has been responsible for 'integrating' immigration and asylum goals into the EU's external relations. This article explores how different Directorates-General have responded to this requirement. Rejecting prevalent rationalist theories, it draws on organisational sociology to argue that administrative organisations are preoccupied with internal social and psychological tasks, and only selectively read and respond to signals from their political environment. Depending on characteristics of the organisation and policy area, one can hypothesise four ideal-typical responses: full adaptation, evasion, institutional decoupling, and reinterpretation. An analysis of Commission responses suggests that DG Justice, Liberty and Security fully adapted to the agenda, while DG External Relations adopted a strategy of institutional decoupling. DG Development shifted from initial evasion to reinterpretation, contributing to the rather incoherent mix of goals that emerged in the 2005 Global Approach. The article considers the implications of this account for theories of policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how the policies specified in EU directives are transposed by EU member states. In contrast to existing transposition studies it develops a policy-specific approach to explain how directives are transposed by national actors. In this approach the outcome of transposition depends on the institutional arena in which decision-making takes place and the interests of the domestic actors involved. These institutional arenas can vary from parliament to national ministries and agencies. Domestic actors are taken as policy-specific veto players. Their preferences may lead to two different responses to the requirements of a directive. First, they can transpose a directive literally, keeping deviations to a minimum. Second, domestic actors can adopt a non-literal interpretation of the directive, leading to more substantial deviations within the boundaries allowed by the European Commission. These responses are illustrated by two cases of transposition of EU directives, the tobacco products directive and the animal trade directive. The case analysis shows that the policy-specific approach proposed in this article helps in understanding transposition. It clarifies how the ambitions formulated in Brussels are transformed by national administrations into policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]