European Commission Officials' Policy Attitudes

Abstract

European Commission officials are usually thought to prefer more to less supranational authority. A large body of work assumes that they maximize the power of their organization. This study suspends a priori preference attribution and empirically investigates variation in support for supranational authority over five policy areas. The analysis uses Kassim et al.'s survey data from 2008 (N = 1,901). The first finding in this article is that Commission officials do not systematically prefer more supranational decision‐making. Following the logic of fiscal federalism, they support changes in EU policy scope to the extent that this would improve public good provision. The second finding, taking a political psychology perspective, is that individual calculations of efficiency are mediated by ideological beliefs. Because issues are complex and information is costly, Commission officials rely on heuristics to assess what the European Union should do. They are biased information‐processors.

When norms and rules collide: the social production of institutional conflict in the European Union

“…When procedural, they tend to be based on principled conceptions of the Commission as the 'guardian of the treaties' (cf. Elinas and Suleiman 2011;Schafer 2014). Roles can be expected to differ across different parts of the Commission.…”

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 ).…”

“…A first set of questions therefore enquires into respondents' preferred distribution of decision‐making power in the European Union as an issue of sovereignty (i.e., the authority over a given policy) (taken from Kassim et al ; Schafer ; Murdoch et al ). EU‐level decision‐making as an issue of sovereignty remains high on the political agenda (Murdoch ; Hobolt ; Murdoch and Geys ), which allows us to operationalize the extent to which someone favours European over national decision‐making power.…”

“…First, these officials play an important role in the internal decision-making process within the European Parliament (Neunreither 2002;Neuhold and Radulova 2006;Winzen 2011;Neuhold and Dobbels 2015). Much like Administrators in the European Commission, they have the ability to influence policy decisions through the exploitation of bureaucratic discretion (Pollack 2003;Olsen 2006;Schafer 2014) and by providing substantive guidance and support to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and other stakeholders (Egeberg et al 2013). This makes them of central relevance to our study.…”

Administrative legitimacy and the democratic deficit of the European Union

“…The substantial public administration involved in EU policy-making processes is important for our overall assessment of the EU's input legitimacy. The reason is that the considerable influence of the EU public administration over policy outcomes through the exploitation of bureaucratic discretion (Pollack 2003;Jabko 2006;Olsen 2006;Schafer 2014) creates a framework where popular policy preferences may influence EU policies even if the bureaucrats are not elected.…”