Policy leadership in the European Commission: the regulation of EU mobile roaming charges

Abstract

Political leadership in the European Commission tends to be associated with high politics and the intervention therein of the Commission President. This contribution takes a different approach by viewing policy leadership by the Commission as a form of political leadership. When the Commission finds it difficult to perform a broader political agenda-setting role, it may still be able to set and deliver new policy initiatives. The contribution considers the conditions under which successful policy leadership occurs. It identifies two types of condition political agency and policy capacityand argues that both, together, are important in explaining successful policy leadership. Evidence is drawn from the case of European mobile roaming.

Indicative Planning and France's Backstage Contribution to Eurozone Governance

“…The creation of the European Commission with the Treaty of Rome complicated this set‐up. On the one hand, the High Authority's ‘blatantly supranational elements’ were denied to the Commission (Cini 1996, p. 36). On the other hand, the first Commission president, Walter Hallstein, attempted to turn the institution into a real centre of supranational authority.…”

The European Union's policy towards Mercosur

“…The debate will be framed in terms of who has the most power. It has already been suggested that the Council is the most powerful of all the EU institutions (for example, see Westlake 1995 ;Cini 1996 ;Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace 1997 ;Thomson and Hosli 2004 ;Schalk et al 2007 ). However, this is contested by Meunier ( 2000 ), who claims that the Council is the central institution in this policy process because it manages to aggregate the preferences of the member states, whilst the Commission is responsible for acting as the negotiating agent of the Council.…”

“…The president, in theory, is supposed to be able to broker deals and facilitate negotiations, which is the opposite of being able to use this position in order to pursue specifi c national interests. Some authors also contend that countries holding the presidency have a low success rate in terms of pursuing their own domestic agendas (for example, Cini 1996 ;Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace 1997 ). In contrast, others consider holding the presidency to be an opportunity to infl uence decision-making (for example, see Westlake 1995 ;Peterson and Bomberg 1999 ).…”