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Balancing Roles of Representation in the European Commission

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Abstract

Representation is one essential dimension of executive governance. This article has a dual ambition: The first is to outline an institutional perspective on representation that may explore and explain the everyday balancing act of representation among government officials. The second ambition is to empirically illuminate dynamics of representation among crucial test-bed inside the European Commission, that of temporary officials. Temporary Commission officials offer a valuable laboratory for exploring the fine balancing act of representation. Based on survey and interview data on temporary Commission officials, this study supports an institutional perspective on representation in two ways. First, temporary Commission officials tend to evoke a tripartite representational repertoire consisting of departmental, epistemic and supranational roles. Second, the composite mix of representational roles evoked by these officials is biased by the organisational boundaries and hierarchies embedding them. Representation within the Commission is a balancing act that is considerably biased by (i) the formal organisation of the Commission, (ii) the multiple organisational embeddedness of the staff, (iii) their degrees of organisational affiliation towards the Commission, (iv) their modes of interaction within the Commission, as well as (v) their educational backgrounds.

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Notes

  1. This article is financed by the research project ‘DISC: Dynamics of International Executive Institutions’ (The Norwegian Research Council). This publication has been possible thanks to the support of CONNEX, the Network of Excellence on efficient and democratic governance in the European Union, funded under the EU 6th Framework Programme of Research. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria, 11–13 May 2006. The author is indebted to valid comments from the participants in Vienna, from two anonymous referees and the editor, to Torbjorn Larsson for research collaboration, and Lene Jeppesen for research assistance.

  2. The DGs covered by the study are: DG Education and Culture, DG Employment and Social Affairs, DG Enterprise, DG Environment, DG Energy and Transport, Eurostat, DG Fisheries, DG Health and Consumer Affairs, DG Information Society, DG Research, DG Taxation and Customs Union, DG Economic and Financial Affairs, DG Trade, DG Competition, and DG Development.

  3. Danish and Icelandic SNEs are not outliners compared to the Norwegian and Swedish SNEs.

  4. The new rules for SNEs were decided on 27 February 2004 (C(2004) 577.

  5. Diagnosis of collinearity between the independent variables in Table 4 unveils no indications of extreme multicollinearity. Thus, the independent variables have independent causal impact on the dependent variables.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Agder, Servicebox 422, Kristiansand, N-4604, Norway

    Jarle Trondal

  2. ARENA, Center for European Studies, University of Oslo, PO Box 1143, Blindern, N-0317, Oslo, Norway

    Jarle Trondal

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Trondal, J. Balancing Roles of Representation in the European Commission. Acta Polit 43, 429–452 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2008.2

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