Unpacking international organisations

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

“…Studies of the behaviour and dynamics of the Commission administration based on survey or interview data with officials provide evidence of Commission officials' behavioural pattern as being both sectoral and supranational. Commission civil servants express affinity first and foremost towards the department to which they belong and their respective DGs represent the main frame of reference for decision-making (Trondal et al 2010). At the administrative level, there is no evidence of an ideological behavioural pattern.…”

The quest for order: unravelling the relationship between the European Commission and European Union agencies

“…Firstly, EU agency personnel and Commission personnel share their primary affiliation (formally) to EU-level bodies. As might be expected from an organizational perspective then, studies show that both groups of staff actually direct their loyalty and attention primarily inside their respective supranational organizations (Suvarierol et al 2013;Trondal and Jeppesen 2008;Trondal et al 2010). Secondly, taking the functional specialization among EU institutions into consideration, we see that EU agencies and the Commission also share the same (executive) functions in the EU polity: they are both in charge of rule implementation and rule development.…”

Conceptualizing common political order: an introduction

“…In contrast, the MLA approach suggests that research focus should shift from regions towards the administrative interior of government institutions at different levels of government, principally towards administrative sub-units at each level, and how these mutually relate. To illustrate, the MLA approach directs attention towards the behavior and role perceptions of unelected office holders (Trondal et al, 2010), the autonomy and interaction of sub-units at each administrative level (Ege and Bauer, 2013;Egeberg, 2006;Trondal and Peters, 2013), the 'in-house' socialization processes of staff (Beyers, 2010), and so on. Focus is thus not primarily on government apparatuses as arenas, but rather on government apparatuses as normative structures that mobilize bias (Schattschneider, 1975) and that contribute to a systematic patterning of behavioral patterns among office holders (Simon, 1957).…”