On Trojan Horses and revolving doors: Assessing the autonomy of national officials in the European Commission

Abstract

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Sliding doors in Brussels: A career path analysis of EU affairs managers

“…The very same dynamics have been demonstrated to also take place in public administrations (Trondal et al. ). Recent works from a more interest group politics perspective confirm that hiring covered officials (the official definition of revolving doors lobbyists in the United States) is associated with favourable regulation (Baumgartner et al.…”

Administrative legitimacy and the democratic deficit of the European Union

“…The sample available for the present analysis consists of 379 respondents (approximately 35% of the total SNE population), and is representative in terms of age and gender. Its distribution across Directorate-Generals also reflects that observed for all Commission SNEs in 2011 (see also Murdoch and Trondal 2013;Trondal et al 2015;Murdoch et al 2016). To measure SNEs' attitudes towards the EU project, the survey included a question asking: 'Before entering the Commission, did you generally think that co-operation within the EU was positive (negative) attitudes towards the EU increases, SNEs from that country tend to also express a more positive (negative) opinion about cooperation within the EU in general (column 1).…”

“…International Civil Service]" (Mouritzen 1990: 35-36). For recent contributions on this autonomy issue among Commission officials, we refer to Ellinas and Suleiman (2012) and Trondal et al (2015), while Weiss (2013) provides a discussion with respect to the same issue within the United Nations.…”

Identity, threat aversion, and civil servants' policy preferences: Evidence from the European Parliament

“…In the language of European integration scholars, the European Parliament—much like the European Commission—maintains that the European Union should be governed primarily in supranational fashion rather than intergovernmental fashion (as desired by the Council of the European Union) (Murdoch ; Egeberg et al , , ; Kassim et al ). Hence, strong identification with the European Parliament's goals would imply that respondents (i) are more favourable towards a distribution of decision‐making power favouring the EU institutions relative to national governments (Kassim et al ; Schafer ; Murdoch et al ), and (ii) put more stress on EU concerns relative to national concerns in their day‐to‐day work (Murdoch and Trondal ; Egeberg et al , ; Trondal et al ).…”