UNDERPRESSURE!The Institutional Role Conceptions

of Commission Officials in an Era

of Politicization

Bart Joachim Bes

Reading CommitteeProf.dr. M. EgebergProf.dr. M. HaverlandProf.dr. G. W. MarksDr. C. RauhProf.dr. B. Vis

© Bart Joachim Bes, 2017

ISBN 978-90-826049-7-9

All rights reserved. Save exceptions stated by law, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system of any nature, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, included a complete or partial transcription, without the prior written permission of the proprietor.

Cover design by Guus Gijben.

Printed by Proefschrift All In One (AIO).

VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT

UNDER PRESSURE!The Institutional Role Conceptions of Commission Officials in an Era of Politicization

ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT

ter verkrijging van de graad Doctor aande Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,op gezag van de rector magnificus

prof.dr. V. Subramaniam,in het openbaar te verdedigen

ten overstaan van de promotiecommissievan de Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappenop woensdag 22 maart 2017 om 11.45 uur

in de aula van de universiteit,De Boelelaan 1105

door

Bart Joachim Bes

geboren te Almere

promotor: prof.dr. E.A.E.B. Hooghecopromotor: prof.dr. B.J.J. Crum

~Til min elskede Signe

~

Table of Contents

List of Figures, Tables, and AppendicesAcknowledgements

Chapter I: In the Minds of Commission Officials: A General IntroductionPart I – IntroductionPart II – Theory and state of the artPart III - Hypothesizing the impact of EU politicization on the CommissionPart IV – Data and methodsPart V – Main findingsPart VI – Discussion

Chapter II: Institutional Role Conceptions of Senior Commission Officials: The Persistent Influence of National factorsIntroductionExplaining supranational attitudesEuropean re-socializationNational pre-socializationStrategic calculationData and methodsDataThe operationalization of the independent and dependent variablesMethod of data analysisRevisiting Commission officials’ institutional role conceptionsExplaining Commission officials’ institutional role conceptionsThe 1995-1997 waveThe 2002 waveThe 2008 waveConclusion

Chapter III: Europe’s Executive in Stormy Weather How Does Politicization Affect Commission Officials’ Attitudes?IntroductionThe European Commission: An ivory tower?The politicization of the European polity

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The European Commission as an open system Theorizing the impact of politicization on Commission officialsAn exploratory case studyCase study designInterview methodologyThe predominance of the institutional pragmatistExposure to EU politicizationPoliticization in the Dutch mediaPoliticization through external contactsPoliticization in daily work Changing role conceptions: Assessing the impact of politicizationThe non-convertsThe reinforced believers ‘The converts’: From supranationalism to institutional pragmatismThe discouraged supranationalistConclusions

Chapter IV: Following the Crowd or Developing a Thicker Skin? Assessing the Impact of Euro Scepticism on the Attitudes of Commission OfficialsIntroduction The Commission as Representative Bureaucracy: Reflecting national sentiments?The theory of representative bureaucracyThe nationality issue in the CommissionIssue salience and responsive policy-makingData and variablesOperationalizationDependent variableIndependent variables and interactionControlsCommission officials’ attitudinal response to Euro scepticism Exploring variation in Commission officials institutional role conceptionsConclusion

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Chapter V: The Constraining Dissensus and the European Commission. A Comparative Case Study of the Negotiations of the EU-Japan Free Trade Agreement and TTIPIntroductionTheorizing the constraining dissensusA postfunctionalist lens Constraining dissensus mechanism I: Increased member state oversightConstraining dissensus mechanism II: Increased transparencyTwo case studies: TTIP and EU-Japan free trade negotiationsProcess tracing and congruence testingDataCase selectionThe European Commission and the constraining dissensusMember state oversight: Business as usual?Transparency: A (partial) move towards improving legitimacy?Conclusions

BibliographyAppendicesSummary

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List of FiguresFigure 1.1: Three sites of politicizationFigure 1.2: Conceptual frameworkFigure 2.1: Composition of role conceptions in the 1995-1997, 2002, and 2008

waveFigure 4.1: Distribution of Commission officials’ institutional role conceptionsFigure 4.2: Cluster analysis of institutional role conception per nationalityFigure 4.3: Relationship between Euro scepticism and Commission officials’

attitudes at the aggregate levelFigure 4.4: Marginal effects plot for the interaction of Euro scepticism and

salience on Commission officials’ institutional role conceptionsFigure 5.1: Two mechanisms by which politicization constrains Commission

officialsFigure 5.2: Percentage against TTIP per country (Eurobarometer)Figure 5.3: TPC’s attention to EU-Japan and TTIP negotiations

List of TablesTable 1.1: Overview of Commission presidentsTable 1.2: Overview of DGs and Services (Juncker Commission 2014 – current)Table 1.3: Overview of data sourcesTable 2.1: The composition of role conceptions within the 1995-1997, 2002, and

2008 waves for the five role – and three role typologyTable 2.2: Hooghe’s (2012) typology of senior Commission officials’ role

conceptionsTable 2.3: Wave 1995-1997, 2002, 2008Table 3.1: Sample overview: length of service, gender, and position in

organizationTable 4.1: Description of the dependent variable, i.e. ‘institutional role

conceptions’Table 4.2: Descriptive statisticsTable 4.3: Multivariate analysis: the impact of Euro scepticism and issue salience

on Commission officials’ attitudesTable 5.1: The ‘constraining dissensus’ mechanisms and data sourcesTable 5.2: Sample overview: length of service, gender, and position in

organization

314064

106109111

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Appendices

Appendix Chapter IITable A1: The operationalization of the independent variables per waveTable A2: Descriptive statistics for the independent variables in wave 1995-1997Table A3: Correlations between the independent variables in wave 1995-1997Table A4: Descriptive statistics for the independent variables in wave 2002Table A5: Correlations between the independent variables in wave 2002Table A6: Descriptive statistics for the independent variables in wave 2008Table A7: Correlations between the independent variables in wave 2008

Appendix Chapter IIIInterview request (in Dutch)Interview checklistInterview questionnairea) A priori checklistb) Interview scheme officials European Commission

Appendix Chapter IVTable A8: Number of Commission officials per country in the sampleTable A9: Distribution of Euro scepticism and Salience per country

Appendix Chapter VInterview request Interview checklistInterview scheme officials European Commission

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AcknowledgementsWhat a ride! This dissertation is the result of four years of hard, but very enjoyable, work. Although the Ph.D. process has sometimes felt like a capricious rollercoaster ride, including incredible highs and a few daunting lows, it is a ride that I would not have wanted to miss for the world. Not only have I learned a great deal about the fascinating political project called ‘the European Union’ (EU) and its executive arm, I have also developed myself as a researcher and a lecturer. And, as the proverbial ‘cherry on top’ I have had the opportunity to travel the world visiting conferences, to meet and discuss with well known colleagues in the field (something I could only have dreamt of during my student years!). Along the way, I have matured personally as well. I moved in with my girlfriend, moved (countries) multiple times, and became the dad of beautiful baby girl Ronja. Indeed, these last four years will not soon be forgotten. Naturally, all of this would not have been possible without the guidance, support, and friendship of what has ended up being quite a large number of wonderful and inspiring people. I would like to thank each one of them for accompanying me on this rollercoaster ride and for keeping my cart safely on the track. First and foremost, I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my doctoral advisors, Ben Crum and Liesbet Hooghe. To begin with, I am thankful to them for seeing potential in me back in 2012 when I had just graduated my Master’s and for giving me the opportunity to pursue a Ph.D.. Ben has been an inspirational daily supervisor with a contagious cheerfulness. He patiently took the time to answer all my questions and provided me with thorough feedback and lots of comments on my work (after four years I can proudly say that I belong to the exclusive group that can decipher Ben’s handwriting!). Whenever I was lost in technicalities, Ben reminded me of the bigger picture and insisted on me keeping my focus on the questions at hand. I am grateful for Ben’s invaluable support, that at times extended beyond regular supervision. Besides discussing research, Ben introduced me to the world of trumpet players and jazz ensembles, such as Snarky Puppy. Indeed, I am still waiting for the day that Ben (trumpet), Trineke (guitar) and I (bass) will form that VU Political Science band. It has been a great pleasure and honour to have Liesbet as my promoter. For one thing, you would never know where the next supervisory meeting would be taking place: at her apartment in Amsterdam, at café de Herengracht, at the VU, or even in Boston! Liesbet carefully advised me on my work (and how to write in an active way!), and taught me the ‘ins and outs’ of the academic world. Liesbet and her husband Gary invited me in to their extensive network and so opened

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many doors for me. They gave me the push and confidence to organize a panel at EUSA in Boston (in which Liesbet even stepped in last-minute as an excellent discussant!), referred me to a workshop on politicization in Berlin and organized Ph.D. seminars with me at their apartment in Amsterdam. Liesbet and Gary are inspirational scholars who are very committed to their Ph.D.’s and support them in whichever way they can. In the beginning of my Ph.D., Gary appointed me as his ‘University Research Fellow’ (URF), which provided me the funds to finance the first half year of my Ph.D.. I owe them both many thanks for all their help and support. Most of the research has been conducted at the department of Political Science and Public Administration at the VU where former teachers became colleagues. I would like to thank Barbara, Bastiaan, Gjalt, Hans, Henk, Jaap, Leo, Naná, Rian, Thijs, Willem, Willem-Jan and Wolfgang for being wonderful colleagues. Particularly, I would like thank the ladies of the secretariat, Margriet, Els and Aniek, for always offering a helping hand, and Paul, with whom I lectured Comparative Political Research. Undoubtedly, without the lively community of Ph.D.’s and postdoc’s, my Ph.D. experience would have been much less fun. For all the nice coffee breaks, lunches, dinners, borrels and discussions, I would like to thank Benjamin, Biejan, Dieuwertje, Eelco, Falk, Feiran, Gijsbert, Hanna, Jeanine, Jilong, Marijn, Mariken, Martijn, Menno, Pelin, Renske, Shanna, Verena, Wilfred, Weijin, Yoav and Yuan, as well as ACCESS EUROPE Ph.D.’s, Basje and Eljalill. Last but not least, I would like to thank my ‘paranimfen’: Jan Pieter and Trineke. Although one of my newest colleagues, Jan Pieter has become a good friend off whom I can always bounce ideas (and drink beers with). Having started our Ph.D.’s around the same time, Trineke has been my ‘partner in crime’ in the Ph.D. process. Together, we endured all the ‘trials and tribulations’ of doing a Ph.D., which we shared during our many coffee breaks (with the occasional walk to the Starbucks when we could no longer stomach the VU coffee). Besides being a helpful colleague, Trineke is a dear friend. During my Ph.D., I have had the pleasure and benefit of a five months research stay at ARENA Centre for European Studies in Oslo. I am deeply grateful to all my colleagues there for hosting me. I have learned a lot about public administration theories and got inspired to adopt an open systems perspective in my dissertation. I would like to thank, in particular, Morten Egeberg. While not being my official supervisor, Morten has overseen my work at ARENA and generously provided it with feedback. I am grateful for his guidance and our many discussions about the Commission and its personnel. Other colleagues to whom I am indebted are John

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Erik Fossum, Åse Gornitzka, Kadri Miard, Asimina Michailidou, Johan P. Olsen, Jarle Trondal and Nina Merethe Vestlund. Finally, I would like to give a ‘shout out’ to my ARENA colleague and good friend from Newcastle; Mr. John Moodie! I thank him for all the ‘Geordie banter’ and fun nights out in Oslo, as well as our numerous (at time heated) discussions about EU policy-making. Without John, my Oslo experience would have certainly been less adventurous. Then there is a large number of scholars who have, knowingly or unknowingly, contributed to my dissertation. First, I would like to thank Jan Kleinnijenhuis for encouraging me to pursue an academic career. Jan has been an inspiring mentor during my Master studies. Second, I am grateful to the European Commission in Question research (EUCIQ) team for granting me access to their dataset: Hussein Kassim, John Peterson, Michael Bauer, Sara Connolly, Renaud Dehousse, Liesbet Hooghe and Andrew Thompson. Without this data, this dissertation would have not been possible. Third, my thinking about the concept of politicization has greatly benefitted from the ‘politicization of European governance’ workshop at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). I owe many thanks to the participants and, in particular, the organizers, Anna Leopold, Henning Schmidtke and Pieter de Wilde, for letting me take part in it. Third, I would like to express my utmost gratitude to Miriam Hartlapp, Julia Metz and Christian Rauh for inviting me to join them in a round table discussion on the European Commission in Berlin. I have had the pleasure of meeting Christian multiple times, and am grateful for his constructive feedback on several chapters of my dissertation. As he was the first to unravel the effects of politicization on the European Commission, his work has been a great source of inspiration to me. Fourth, my gratitude goes to the Centre d’étude de la via politique (CEVIPOL), particularly Amandine Crespy and Frederik Ponjaert, for giving me the opportunity to present the preliminary findings of Chapter III. Finally, for comments big and small, I would like to sincerely thank Bart van Ballaert, Katharina Barie, Jan Beyers, Adriana Bunea, Andreas Dür, Lisa Dellmuth, Magali Gravier, Miriam Hartlapp, Enrique Hernández Pérez, Thomas Henökl, Simon Hix, Dominic Hoeglinger, Swen Hutter, Francis Jacobs, Sebastian Kurpas, Zuzana Murdoch, Gijs Schumacher, Ezra Suleiman, Semin Suvarierol, Jonas Tallberg, Anchrit Wille and Arndt Wonka. Before moving on to acknowledging some central people in my private sphere, I would like to express my gratitude to all 33 Commission officials that have kindly accepted my interview request and provided me with very useful insights. Moreover, I would like to send a special thanks to the members of my reading committee who have carefully read my dissertation and given me sharp comments:

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Morten Egeberg, Markus Haverland, Gary Marks, Christian Rauh and Barbara Vis. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the financial support for my Ph.D. project from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), under grant #400-09-2015. Now I would like to thank a number of my close friends who have helped me along the way by not only showing an interest in, but also by giving me healthy breaks from, my project. First of all, I would like to thank my Walibi/Pinkpop crew, Elise, Iris, Ries, Nicoline, and Michael, for the necessary distraction but also for all the help that they have offered in the last couple of years. Samuel, the night that we hammer smashed your piggy bank and spent it all on beer at ‘Gollem’ will not soon be forgotten. Geert, Khalid, Kasia, Sebastian, Marcel, Verica, and Michnea, I am grateful for your warm friendship and support that you have given me throughout the years. Finally, I would like to thank my ‘Communication Science’ buddies for all the gezellige get-togethers: Chris, Marissa, Maurice (and Ana), Nicole and Wendy. I am a rich man to have so many good friends in my life. Then I would like to thank my Danish family (in law): Anne, Claus, Ida, Torben, Rasmus, Maja, and Jakob. Many thanks for making me feel welcome in the family, for the hygge and for being proud of me. The last four years, I have kept your datter/søster/moster with me in Amsterdam and Oslo. Thank you for supporting our international life style; it must not have always been easy for you. Furthermore, I owe deep gratitude to my own family: mam, pap, Dick, Cees-Jeroen, Wannaya, David, Sabina and Daan. Many thanks to my brothers and sisters-in-law for your support (you have helped us move three times in the last four years!) and all the fantastic trips we made to concerts, the theatre, whisky festivals and so much more. I know that I can always count on you guys! I would like to warmly thank my parents for giving me the opportunity to study, which laid the foundation for this dissertation. Mam and pap, thanks for your endless love throughout my life. Finally, I would like to thank my one and only Signe. You undoubtedly deserve the greatest ‘thank you’ of all as you have been the biggest support all the way through my Ph.D.. You have been there to help me through the daunting lows and been the first around to celebrate the incredible highs. Your love, patience, trust, and unfaltering belief in me have absolutely been the bedrock on which this dissertation has been build. We have grown stronger together in life and each step of the way you have stood by me without any hesitation. You travelled with me on a whim to Reykjavík, moved in with me in Amsterdam, then in Oslo, and back again in Amsterdam, and now we are finding our happiness in Copenhagen. Not

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only are you a loving partner, you are now also a caring mother having given me a beautiful daughter Ronja (my darling Ronja, thank you for being awesome and sleeping so well at night!). To show my gratitude, I dedicate this dissertation to you, Signe. Jeg elsker dig!

CopenhagenJanuary 2017

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Chapter 1

Ch. 1

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Chapter I

In the Minds of European Commission OfficialsA General Introduction

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‘You’d have to be deaf and blind not to realise that the EU and the Commission are viewed with increasing suspicion. (...) The best way to reverse the tide is to put stress on the political role of the Commission, making it more responsive to popular concerns.’

Jean-Claude Juncker (AFM 2014) - the then European People’s Party (EPP) candidate for the position of Commission President

Part I - Introduction ‘I am convinced that this will be the “last-chance Commission”: either we will succeed in bringing our citizens closer to Europe, or we will fail’, said Commission President-elect Jean-Claude Juncker ahead of his approval vote by the European Parliament (EP) in October 2014. Since the difficult ratification of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the executive of the European Union (EU) faces a political and public environment that has increasingly grown sceptical of European integration (Kassim et al. 2013, pp. 131-133; Rauh 2016; Tsakatika 2005, p. 203). Citizens and national politicians alike believe that European integration has continued for too long without clear popular consent (Hooghe and Marks 2008). With its central role in EU policy-making, criticism is often directed at the European Commission and its bureaucratic elite that is ‘apparently unrestrained striving for an “ever closer” European Union’ (Wonka 2015, p. 84). To ‘restore European citizens’ confidence and strengthen the relationship between the Commission and the public, Juncker (2014, p. 2) placed ‘democratic change’ at the heart of his political guidelines for the Commission. Yet as Commissioner-elect for Better Regulation, Frans Timmermans, confessed during his parliamentary hearing in 2014: ‘no change is more difficult than changing the culture by which organisations operate. No change is more difficult than breaking with long established practices and attitudes’. This dissertation aims to dig deeper into these ‘long established’ attitudes of Commission officials in the Post-Maastricht era. Despite two early studies that warn for the Commission’s internal division along national and departmental lines (Coombes 1970; Michelmann 1978), the Commission has traditionally been conceptualized as a unitary actor occupied with officials that invariantly strive for the expansion of the EU’s legislative scope. Whereas recent versions of the classical neofunctionalist theory (Haas 1958; Lindberg and Scheingold 1970) hypothesize that EU elites will ultimately transfer their loyalty to the EU institutions, i.e. ‘a shift of loyalty towards a new centre’ (Jensen 2010; Rosamond 2005), rational

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choice theory conceptualizes Commission officials as utility-maximizers that benefit from more European integration (Pollack 2003; Jupille 2004; Franchino 2007). Commission officials are thus assumed to hold supranationalist views on the desired scope of European integration and the role that their organization has in EU policy-making. From a different perspective, also intergovernmentalism tends to reinforce the conception of the Commission as a unitary actor as they regard it as merely an agent that helps to further the interests of its principals, i.e. the member states (Hoffmann 1995; Moravcsik 1993, 1998). Signalling the lack of empirical attention to the ‘internal life’ of the Commission, Geoffrey Edwards and David Spence (1994, p. 1) stated that: ‘given its importance in the integration process (…) there has been a surprising dearth of academic or other study of the European Commission’. The concerns of Edwards and Spence have been widely addressed. Since the early 1990s, EU scholars have opened the ‘black-box’ of the Commission and started to study, amongst others, its internal functioning (e.g. Balint et al. 2008; Cram 1994; Christiansen 1997; Ellinas and Suleiman 2012; Egeberg 1996; Hartlapp et al. 2014; Kassim et al. 2013; Mastenbroek et al. 2015; Peterson 1995; Rauh 2016; Ross 1993, 1995; Suvarierol 2008; Thomson 2008; Nugent 1997; Page 1997; Page and Wouters 1994; Stevens and Stevens 2001; Wonka 2008), institutional reforms (e.g. Bauer 2008; Cini 2004; Ellinas and Suleiman 2008; Kassim 2004, 2008; Metcalfe 2000; Ongaro 2015; Peterson 2008; Schön-Quinlivan 2008; Wille 2013) and the, supposedly supranational, attitudes and role conceptions of its office-holders (e.g. Abélès and Bellier 1996; Abélès et al. 1993; Ban 2013; Bauer 2012; Bellier 2000; Cini 1996; Dehousse and Thompson 2012; Dimitrakopoulos and Kassim 2005; Egeberg 1999, 2006; Ellinas and Suleiman 2011; Georgakakis 2013; Hooghe 2001, 2005; McDonald 1996; Shore 2000; Trondal 2006, 2007). The first studies of the Commission’s personnel were anthropological and focussed on the Commission’s culture (Abélès and Bellier 1996; Abélès et al. 1993; Bellier 2000). A second wave of studies emerged after Liesbet Hooghe’s (1999a, 1999b) landmark research on Commission officials’ attitudes. In her seminal article, Hooghe (1999b, p. 436) takes issue with the traditional conception of the Commission as a unitary actor by arguing that: ‘(…) [O]ur understanding of European integration remains poor at best, and possibly mistaken, if we fail to account for the motivations and opinions of key position holders in the European institutions’. Based on the federal vs. intergovernmental mode of organizing international authority, Hooghe initially (1999a, 1999b) discerns two types of Commission officials: the ‘supranationalists’, i.e. those officials that conceive of the

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Commission as the central actor in EU policy-making that steers the EU towards a federation, and ‘intergovernmentalists’, i.e. those officials that conceive of the Commission as serving the member states’ interests expressed in the Council. Later, Hooghe (2012, p. 90; Kassim et al. 2013, Chapter 4) added a third type: the ‘institutional pragmatists’, which is based on Haas’ notion of the Commission and the member states as ‘interlocking and complimentary’ institutions. Instead of assuming an antagonism between them, institutional pragmatists conceive of the Commission as a partner of the member states, with whom it jointly provides political guidance to the integration process. They aim for proposing European solutions whilst being sensitive to national diversity (Hooghe 2012, p. 91). Hooghe’s research sparked a scholarly debate on how to explain supranationalism in the European Commission, as conceptualized through, for example, attitudes (e.g. Dehousse and Thompson 2012; Hooghe 2012; Kassim et al. 2013) or role conceptions (e.g. Ban 2013; Egeberg 1996; Trondal 2007; Wille 2013). Notwithstanding two recent studies that emphasize the co-presence of multiple explanatory factors (Connolly and Kassim 2016; Murdoch and Geys 2012), this debate can be divided into three schools: European re-socialization (Egeberg 1996; Trondal 2006, 2007, 2010); national pre-socialization (Hooghe 1999b, 2001, 2005, 2012); and strategic calculation (Bauer 2012; Rauh 2016). In short, 1) national pre-socialization assumes that Commission officials’ attitudes are determined by their national experiences before they enter the Commission, and thus vary per nationality; 2) European re-socialization theorizes that the institutional setting of the Commission gradually re-socializes Commission officials into having attitudes compatible to its supranational objectives; and 3) strategic calculation supposes that Commission officials’ attitudes are shaped by rational cost-benefit analyses, leading them to favour more European integration and thus adopt supranationalist attitudes. This dissertation takes this debate as its starting point. To assess the degree and variation of ‘supranationalism’ in the Commission in the Post-Maastricht era, I investigate the attitudes that Commission officials have towards the role of their organization within the EU policy-making process, i.e. their ‘institutional role conceptions’ (Bes 2016; Hooghe 2012; Juncos and Pomorska 2010). To this end, the dissertation asks the following central research question:

RQ: What explains the institutional role conceptions and behaviour of Commission officials in the Post-Maastricht era?

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The first objective of this dissertation is to map the different views held by Commission officials and to assess how they can be best explained. With the use of a refined version of Hooghe’s (2012) institutional role typology, ranging from supranationalists to intergovernmentalistst, Chapter II assesses the composition of the institutional role conceptions of Commission officials at three time points (1995-1997, 2002, 2008) and tests the three theoretical tracks as explained above. The results confirm that national background is an important predictor for Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. The second objective of this dissertation is to explore if, and how, Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions are affected by the more critical Post-Maastricht environment. After four decades of ‘permissive consensus’, a situation in which EU policy-making was largely off the public radar (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970), the EU has shifted into an era of a ‘constraining dissensus’, a situation in which European integration is more visible and contested amongst a wider public (Hooghe and Marks 2008). Indeed, the EU polity has become ‘politicized’ (De Wilde and Zürn 2012; Hoeglinger 2016; Hutter and Grande 2014; Statham and Trenz 2015). The end of the permissive consensus has been theorized to make national governments more hesitant to engage in EU policy-making and aim to increase their control over it (Bickerton et al. 2015, pp. 709-710). Against this backdrop, a scholarly debate has emerged about whether or not the Commission’s agenda-setting and policy-making authority is ‘in decline’ (Bauer and Becker 2014; Becker et al. 2016; Brown 2016; Da Conceição-Heldt 2016; Dehousse 2016; Hodson 2013; Kassim et al. 2013, pp. 130-50; Nugent and Rhinard 2016; Peterson 2015; Schmidt 2016; Steinebach and Knill 2016). Whereas the European Commission, particularly under the presidency of Jacques Delors (mid-1980s to mid-1990s), has been described as the ‘engine of integration’ (Pollack 2003; Ross 1995), it has now been referred to as ‘the little engine that wouldn’t’ (Hodson 2013). Politicization does not only challenge the legitimacy of the EU polity (De Wilde 2011), it also challenges the legitimacy of the European Commission (Hartlapp et al. 2014; Rauh 2016). The Commission responds to politicization with measures that aim to improve its relationship with the public (cf. also Dinan 2016). As the Commission as a whole responds to politicization, it may be plausible that its officials also respond to it. Hence, to broaden the scope of the debate on attitude-formation in the Commission, I introduce and test a new explanatory variable: the politicization of the European Union (Hooghe and Marks 2008; Hutter et al. 2016; De Wilde and Zürn 2012). This leads to the following sub-question:

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SQ1: How does politicization of the EU affect Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions?

In this dissertation, I argue that politicization resonates in Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. Concerns about the legitimacy of their organization induce Commission officials to reconsider their attitudes towards the role of their institution in EU policy-making. In particular, I expect that Commission officials are sensitive to the politicization in their home country. This assumption is informed by two kinds of considerations. First, the intensity and substance of politicization varies per national debate (Hutter and Grande 2014; Hoeglinger 2016). Different degrees of politicization may hence explain variation in institutional role conceptions between officials with different national backgrounds. Second, as Chapter II, as well as previous research, shows that national background remains an important predictor for Commission officials’ attitudes, I assume that domestic debates have a continuing influence on the institutional role conceptions of Commission officials. Chapter III and Chapter IV explore the relationship between Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions and the politicization in their home country. While Chapter III shows that politicization pushes Commission officials to reconsider their (supranationalist) institutional role conceptions, Chapter IV refines this relationship and shows that when the EU is less salient in their home country, Commission officials ‘bend with the winds’ and become more state-centric, while when the EU is salient in their home country, they actually tend to ‘resist the tide’ and become more supranationalist. The final objective of this dissertation is to investigate how politicization affects the behaviour of Commission officials. While conceptualizations of attitudes abound, Richard Perloff (2008, p. 59) distils the following definition of an attitude: ‘a learned global evaluation of an object (person, place, or issue) that influences thought and action’. Hence, there is an intrinsic link between attitudes and behaviour. Moving beyond attitudes, this dissertation therefore asks:

SQ2: How does politicization of the EU affect Commission officials’ policy-making behaviour?

As Commission officials are an integral part of the EU’s executive, their attitudes matter for shaping EU policies. Chapter V examines how politicization affects the

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policy-making behaviour of Commission officials in the area of external trade, a core competence of the EU (Meunier 2003; Meunier and Nicolaïdis 1999). External trade provides a hard case for investigating the consequences of politicization as the delegation of competences to supranational non-majoritarian institutions has been argued to actually depoliticize policy-making (Schimmelfennig 2014; Mair 2007). To investigate the impact of politicization on Commission officials’ policy-making behaviour, I compare the processes of two ongoing trade negotiations: the politicized negotiations of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the depoliticized EU-Japan trade agreement. The Chapter shows that while politicization induces the Commission to become more transparent, the impact of the constraining dissensus in the area of international trade is limited as Commission officials have only marginally changed their positions in response to politicization. The remainder of this general introduction proceeds as follows. Part II presents the theory and state of the art of studies on the European Commission, the attitudes of Commission officials, and the politicization of the EU. Part III develops and formulates the hypotheses of this dissertation, while part IV provides an overview of the data sources and methods employed. Finally, part V describes the main findings of the dissertation while part VI discusses the implications of these research findings.

Part II - Theory and State of the ArtEuropean Commission: A political bureaucracy of international compositionThe Commission is at the centre of the EU’s executive order (Curtin and Egeberg 2008). The Commission is an international executive with a number of unique features. First, with its exclusive formal competence to initiate and draft EU legislation, the Commission is much more powerful and autonomous than any other international secretariat (Hooghe 2005, p. 863). Yet, although the Commission’s organizational structure resembles a government, including a political (the College of Commissioners and their cabinets) and an administrative wing (the Directorates-General and the Services), it is not led by publicly elected politicians (Egeberg 2010). Second, while the Commission is supposed to be a neutral bureaucracy that serves the ‘general interest’ of the EU, it is also a political actor as it has to continuously bargain with the other EU institutions that rely on an electoral mandate (Christiansen 1997, pp. 76-85). Third, while the Commission is accountable to the member states, it also increasingly aims to

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increase its accountability towards the EU citizens with ‘an elaborate program of greater openness, transparency and subsidiarity (...) (ibid. p. 86). Fourth, the Commission is a relatively small institution that brings together people with different national and professional backgrounds (Kassim et al. 2013). In 2016, the Commission is composed of 32.900 officials, of which 22.244 officials are permanent staff (European Commission 2016a). The next paragraphs describe the history and main functions of the European Commission. The earliest predecessor of the European Commission, i.e. the ‘High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community’ (or ‘High Authority’), was established in the Treaty of Paris in 1951 after the Second World War. To prevent future wars, the then French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, famously proposed that the Franco-German steel and coal production would be part of an international organization that included four other European countries (Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg). The idea of a High Authority came from French civil servant Jean Monnet who envisaged the High Authority as a supranational and non-majoritarian body, occupied by a technocratic elite that would drive the community forwards (Featherstone 1994). Monnet’s High Authority was supposed to be legitimated by its effective problem-solving capacity rather than by a democratic system with checks and balances. The ‘benevolent’ technocrats of the High Authority were to consult representatives of industry and so build consensus for European policies through transnational coalitions (Featherstone 1994, p. 155; Paterson 1993, p. 17; Wallace 1993, p. 300). The supranational technocrats would convince economic groups from one country of the benefits of cooperation with economic groups from another country. Out of concerns about the wide range of powers originally envisaged for the High Authority, the Council of Ministers, the Court of Justice, and the Assembly (later the European Parliament), were established as institutional checks and the High Authority was left with a tightly contained mandate (Featherstone 1994, p. 158). Despite these changes to his original vision, Jean Monnet became the first President of the High Authority. The High Authority was led by nine members; one member from each small country (Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg) and two from each big country (Italy, Germany, and France). In 1958, the Treaty of Rome established two other communities, each with its own executive: the Commission of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the Commission of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom). The former German state secretary of Foreign Affairs, Walter Hallstein was the first President of the Commission of the EEC and is regarded as the first Commission President (Dinan

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2010). The 1967 Merger Treaty combined the three communities with their executive bodies into one: the Commission of the European Communities (EC), which was led by President Jean Rey. With the big bang enlargement in 2004, each member state was allocated one member in the Commission of the EC. With the 2009 Treaty of Lisbon, the Commission of the EC has been officially renamed European Commission. Table 1.1. provides an overview of the Commission Presidents since Walter Hallstein.

While the Commission is not the government of the EU, it does have a government-like structure. It is headed by a political College of Commissioners, including a President, a number of vice-Presidents and, since the 2008 Lisbon Treaty, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, who is responsible for the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). The College has a five year term (ex. Article 17 TEU) and functions on the basis of the principle of collegiality. This means that all Commissioners are together responsible for all decisions. Each Commissioner has its own ‘cabinet’; a group of political advisors (Egeberg and Heskestad 2010, p. 777). Work inside the

Table 1.1: Overview of Commission Presidents

Years Name Member State

1958 - 1967 Walter Hallstein Germany

1967 - 1970 Jean Rey Belgium

1970 - 1972 Franco Malfatti Italy

1972 Sicco Mansholt The Netherlands

1973 - 1977 François-Xavier Ortoli France

1977 - 1981 Roy Jenkins United Kingdom

1981 - 1985 Gaston Thorn Luxembourg

1985 - 1995 Jacques Delors France

1995 - 1999 Jacques Santer Luxembourg

1999 Manuel Marin Spain

1999 - 2004 Romano Prodi Italy

2004 - 2014 José Manuel Barroso Portugal

2014 - current Jean-Claude Juncker Luxembourg

Source: Dinan (2010, p. 173).

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Commission is vertically organized as the College, the political leadership, heads the administration of civil servants. In doing so, the College is supported by a Secretariat-General. Like national ministers, each Commissioner is in charge of a particular policy area. The policy areas are horizontally divided over departments called ‘Directorates-Generals’ (DG’s) (Wonka 2015, pp. 84-85). While the number of DGs varies over time, the current Juncker Commission directs 33 DGs and 12 services. Each DG is subdivided into directorates, which, in turn, are divided into units. The officials in charge of the DG’s are called ‘Directorate-Generals’, the leading officials of the directorates are the ‘Directors’, and the officials heading units are the ‘Heads of Unit’. Table 1.2. shows an overview of the different DG’s and Services under the Juncker Commission. Article 17 of the consolidated version of the Treaty on the European Union spells out the five functions of the Commission. First, the ‘Commission shall promote the general interest of the Union and take appropriate initiatives to that end’ (ex. Article 17 TEU). The Commission is the ‘Guardian of the Treaties’ and is supposed to be a mediator, or ‘honest broker’, between the 28 member states. Second, in most policy areas, the Commission has the exclusive ‘right of initiative’, which means that the Commission proposes laws. With this competence, the Commission has an important agenda-setting role in EU policy-making (Egeberg 2010), which underpins its role as ‘policy entrepreneur’ (Laffan 1997; but see Kreppel and Oztas 2016; Steinebach and Knill 2016) or ‘engine of integration’ (Pollack 2003). Before making proposals, the Commission consults all important stakeholders such as member states, businesses, civil society and

Table 1.2: Overview of DGs and Services (Juncker Commission 2014 - current)

Directorates-General Services

Agriculture and Rural Development (AGRI)

Central Library

Budget (BUDG) European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF)

Climate Action (CLIMA) European Commission Data Protection Officer

Communication (COMM) European Political Strategy Centre (EPSC)

Communications Networks, Content and Technology (CNET)

Historical archives

Competition (COMP) Infrastructures and Logistics – Brussels (OIB)

T1.2 →

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Economic and Financial Affairs (ECFIN) Infrastructures and Logistics – Luxembourg (OIL)

Education and Culture (EAC) Internal Audit Service (IAS)

Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion (EMPL)

Legal Service (SJ)

Energy (ENER) Office for Administration and Payment of Individual Entitlements (PMO)

Environment (ENV) Publications Office (OP)

European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO)

The Structural Reform Support Service (SRSS)

Eurostat (ESTAT)

Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union (FISMA)

Health and Food Safety (SANTE)

Human Resources and Security (HR)

Informatics (DIGIT)

Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs (GROW)

International Cooperation and Development (DEVCO)

Interpretation (SCIC)

Joint Research Centre (JRC)

Justice and Consumers (JUST)

Maritime Affairs and Fisheries (MARE)

Migration and Home Affairs (HOME)

Mobility and Transport (MOVE)

Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations (NEAR)

Regional and urban Policy (REGIO)

Research and Innovation (RTD)

Secretariat-General (SG)

Service for Foreign Policy Instruments (FPI)

Taxation and Customs Union (TAXUD)

Trade (TRADE)

Translation (DGT)

Source: http://ec.europa.eu/about/ds_en.htm

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even individual citizens. Since 2012 there is the ‘Citizen’s Initiative’ (Conrad et al. 2016). This is a petition that, when signed by at least one million EU citizens from seven different member states, requests the Commission to act on a certain topic. The Commission’s proposals are required to comply with impact assessments that determine the need for supranational action and assess the economic, social, or environmental impacts of the proposed legislation (Radaelli 2005). Third, besides initiating law proposals, the Commission also ensures the application of the Treaties and monitors the implementation of Union law (Egeberg 2010). Fourth, the executive of the EU executes the budget and manages European programmes (ex. Article 17 TEU; Egeberg 2010) and, finally, with the exception of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), and other policy areas as codified in the Treaties, the Commission represents the EU externally (ex. Article 17 TEU). In sum, the Commission has a central position in the EU decision-making process and is for a long time perceived as the driver of European integration. This is reason to examine how its office holders, that propose and draft EU policies, conceive of the Commission’s role within EU policy-making.

Commission officials and supranationalism: Towards a first set of hypothesesSince Hooghe’s (1999b) seminal article about supranationalism in the European Commission, a debate has emerged about attitude formation of Commission officials and the explanatory value of their national background. Roughly, the debate can be divided in three schools: European re-socialization; national pre-socialization; and strategic calculation. The debate has mostly revolved around the first two, which, according to Sara Connolly and Hussein Kassim (2016, p. 734) ‘have to some extent been arguing past each other’, due to their different conceptualizations of ‘supranationalism’. While the national pre-socialization camp has been focussing on attitudes (Hooghe 2005, 2012), the European re-socialization camp has emphasized role conceptions, i.e. how Commission officials perceive themselves and, as marked by rules or norms, how they feel others expect them to behave (Trondal 2006, 2007; cf. also Deutsch et al. 1957, pp. 5-6; Herrmann and Brewer 2004, p. 6). While I agree with the observation of Connolly and Kassim (2016), I still take these three perspectives as my starting point. Below, I explain why.

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In his work on role conceptions, Donald Searing identifies the multiple layers of roles, including a specific subset of attitudes. In the context of his motivational approach, Searing argues that roles ‘are particular patterns of interrelated goals, attitudes, and behaviours’ (1994, p. 18). Organizational roles are not built into institutional structures (structural-functionalism) or produced by human interaction (symbolic interactionism) alone. They are also shaped by individual preferences (e.g. career goals and emotional incentives) that officials have acquired before they join an institution. In fact, these individual preferences form the role’s ‘motivational core’ that lead to ‘characteristic attitudes’ and ‘characteristic behaviours’ associated with one’s role conception (Searing 1994, p. 19). Indeed, while the concepts of supranationalism as used in the different schools are not similar, they are related and point in the same direction: a preference for a supranational rather than an intergovernmental mode of decision-making for solving cross-border issues in the EU, supporting a strong and autonomous Commission (Trondal 2007, p. 1112; Hooghe 2012, p. 91). The next paragraphs elaborate on the three schools that deal with explaining attitude-formation in the Commission. First, the national pre-socialization approach argues that national background is an important factor for shaping the attitudes of EU officials (Beyers 2005; Hooghe 2005, 2012; Kassim et al. 2013). Proponents of this approach argue that one’s deep political convictions are shaped in the environment in which one matures, which is often in one’s home country. Their argument is grounded in two social psychological mechanisms: the ‘primacy effect’ (Sears and Levy 2003; cf. also Asch 1946) and the ‘effect of novelty’ (Sears and Funk 1999). Whereas the former expects that strong prior experiences mitigate the impact of new experiences, the latter assumes that initial experiences as such are stronger than subsequent ones. Moreover, Hooghe (2012) argues that the multinational setup of the EU, including all EU institutions and the interaction with the member states, may prime EU officials on their national background and loyalty. This leads us to the first hypothesis:

H1a: Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions vary along national background

Second, the European re-socialization approach contends that the EU institutions have the capacity to re-socialize their officials into having loyalties or role conceptions that align with their supranational objectives (Egeberg 1999,

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2012; Henökl 2014; Trondal 2004, 2007). EU officials do not have the capacity to process, and to know all available information, or possible outcomes of action. To make decisions, officials rely on heuristic shortcuts; a decision-making mode which is thus based on ‘bounded rationality’ (Simon 1965). The heuristic shortcuts are provided to them through organizational norms and incentive systems. As these heuristics offer the prescriptions of what is socially defined as appropriate or exemplary behaviour, officials are expected to behave according to this ‘logic of appropriateness’ (March and Olsen 1998, pp. 952-954). The European re-socialization approach thus expects that the Commission’s institutional setting fosters supranationalism among its officials. The crucial element of re-socialization is the time that officials have spent in the Commission (Hooghe 2005; Trondal 2007; Zürn and Checkel 2005), leading to the following hypothesis:

H1b: The longer officials work for the European Commission, the more supranationalist they become

Finally, there is the rational choice perspective on bureaucrats (Downs 1967; Dunleavy 1991; Niskanen 1973). The ontological assumption of rational choice is that human beings always strive to obtain the most beneficial outcomes for themselves and thus act in their own interest. Human beings are utility-maximizers and base their behaviour on rational cost-benefit calculations. Whereas William Niskanen assumes that all bureaucrats strive for budget maximization, Anthony Downs’ pluralist model (1967, p. 441-2) underscores motivational diversity. He argues that there can be five different ‘personalities’ among civil servants based on different combinations of power, income, prestige, convenience, security (as in maintaining the level of all before mentioned wants), personal loyalty, mission commitment, pride in proficient performance of work, and the desire to serve the public interest (ibid., p. 148-9). Rational choice, or as Jeffrey Checkel (2005) calls it ‘strategic calculation’, thus hypothesizes that Commission officials, motivated by their search for more power, will strengthen the institution in which they operate, leading them to hold supranationalist views. This implies that supranationalism may, for instance, vary among Commission officials to the extent that European integration is beneficial for their home country (Hooghe 2001).

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H1c: The more European integration is in the immediate personal benefit of Commission officials, the more supranationalist they become

Chapter II of this dissertation tests these three hypotheses over time (1995 – 2008). The Chapter finds the following paradox: while Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions have become more heterogeneous and more nuanced, they are best explained by relatively static national background factors, such as the degree of federalism and population size of one’s home country. In search of a more fluid national background variable, this dissertation adds a new explanatory variable to the scholarly debate on attitude-formation in the Commission: the politicization of the EU in national public debates. As politicization has been conceptualized in a number of different ways, the next section provides a conceptualization of politicization.

Coming to grips with the concept of politicization1

The concept of politicization is contested within EU studies. Different ‘manifestations’, or ‘dimensions’, of the concept have been discerned (De Wilde 2011; Hutter and Grande 2014; Rauh 2016). Politicization may be best understood as a set of distinct, yet interrelated, processes that unfold in different sites. Notwithstanding the general notion that politicization is the process of making a particular object ‘political’ (e.g. issues, institutions, policy-making), politicization means something different in each site.

Politicization in national debates

Politicization in EU decision-making

Politicization in institutions

Politicization in national debates

Politicization in EU decision-making

Politicization in institutions

Figure 1.1: Three sites of politicization

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Building on the classification of Pieter de Wilde (2011, pp. 560-563), I describe the following three sites of politicization: EU politicization in national public spheres, the politicization of the European decision-making process, and the politicization of EU institutions. These three politicization processes affect each other. In particular, I argue that politicization in national public spheres is a precondition for politicization in the other two sites. Figure 1.1. depicts a graphical representation of this idea, illustrated by concentric circles. The first site of politicization is the national public sphere. This is the conceptualization which is used in this dissertation. Ever since the difficult ratification process of the Maastricht Treaty in the 1990s, issues of European integration have entered the realm of national public debates. De Wilde (2011, p. 566-7) defines this type of politicization as: ‘an increase in polarization of opinions, interests or values and the extent to which they are publicly advanced towards the process of policy formulation within the EU’. The theoretical basis for this process is anchored in neo-functionalism. Following Ernst Haas’ writings about ‘turbulence’ (1976), Philippe Schmitter (1969, pp. 165-165) hypothesized that the increase of supranational policy areas would elicit a wider audience being interested and engaged in regional integration. Likewise, Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks (2008) argue that politicization is a response to national transfers of authority to the EU (cf. also De Wilde and Zürn 2012). However, whereas neofunctionalists initially assumed that politicization would lead to European state-building, postfunctionalism (Hooghe and Marks 2008, p. 5) holds that politicization may impede European integration. Hooghe and Marks argue that politicization is not expected to occur in each and every circumstance. In particular, an issue is politicized when 1) it has high salience for public opinion (in contrast to merely having high salience for organized interests); 2) when it is connected with the Green/Alternative/Libertarian vs. Traditional/Authoritarian/Nationalist (GAL/TAN) dimension of societal conflict, which taps into identitarian concerns (Hooghe et al. 2004); and 3) when it is catapulted in the public domain by a political entrepreneur, usually a political party that seeks electoral advantage in domestic party competition, or forced into it by the arena rules (e.g. referendums) (cf. also Hutter et al. 2016). Politicization has led to rising levels of public scepticism and concerns about the EU’s legitimacy (De Wilde 2011, p. 564). Fed by the EU’s democratic deficit and governments shifting the blame for unpopular policies to the European level, the Commission is often a main target of criticism (Dinan 2010, p. 171; Ellinas and Suleiman 2012, p. 154). Research confirms that Commission officials tend to be responsive

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to politicization in their attitudes and policy-making (Ellinas and Suleiman 2012; Rauh 2016). The second site of politicization is the EU decision-making process. Supranational policy-making has become more political because of the increased importance of political bodies. Politicization in national debates, including public concerns over democratic representation at the EU level, provides an important impetus for reforming the EU institutions. In particular, the European Parliament (EP) has been empowered to reduce the EU’s notorious democratic deficit (Kassim et al. 2013, p. 132). The EP has evolved from a consultative body to a fully-fledged co-legislator step by step since the 1986 Single European Act (Rittberger 2003). Frank Häge (2011) shows that a powerful EP can politicize Council decision-making by introducing new issues, promoting extreme positions, or drawing public attention to specific issues. As its legislative and supervisory powers have been strengthened, the empowerment of the EP as co-legislator constrains the Commission (Kassim and Menon 2004; Kassim et al. 2013). The political power of the EP over the Commission is furthermore expressed by its growing influence on the appointment of the Commission via the Spitzenkandidaten elections (Hobolt 2014). At the same time, the decline of the permissive consensus has made the member states more hesitant to engage in EU policy-making. To obtain more control over the EU policy-making process, the European Council is said to have joined the Commission in setting the policy agenda (Puetter 2013, cf. also Bauer and Ege 2012, p. 418). This leads us to the third site: politicization in the EU institutions. The politicization of supranational decision-making highlights the political divisions within those institutions that are most sensitive to political and public pressures: the EP and the Council of Ministers. In these two institutions, politicization refers to the growing dominance of party politics. Politics in the EP has been shown to follow ideological rather than national patterns (Hix et al. 2005), whereas assessments of coalition formation in the Council of Ministers support the importance of a left-right political dimension (Mattila 2004; Hagemann 2008). In contrast, while the European Council has become a more important agenda-setter, party politicization seldom occurs in this institution (Tallberg and Johansson 2008). Politicization in the EP and the Council, subsequently stimulates politicization of the College of the Commission. Anchrit Wille (2012, p. 388) notes that the politicization of the College can be observed in the process of selecting Commissioners, and in the demand for, and supply of, candidate Commissioners

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with a stronger political portfolio. In parallel, the politicization of the Commission’s administration refers to ‘the substitution of political criteria for merit-based criteria in the selection, retention, promotion, rewards, and disciplining of members of the civil service’ (Peters and Pierre 2004, p. 2). When looking at the relationship between the ‘political’ College and the Commission’s administration, Michael Bauer and Jörn Ege (2012) find that the latter is weakly politicized (cf. also Balint et al. 2008). Although the College has thus become more politicized, Commission officials appear to remain relatively de-politicized. In fact, Miriam Hartlapp (2015) argues that the ‘political and the bureaucratic spheres in the EU Commission are drifting apart in terms of politicization’, as the administration becomes more apolitical and the Commissioners more political (cf. also Peterson 2008, p. 767; Wonka 2007; Döring 2007). Politicization in the three sites contributes to the ‘normalization’ of the Commission, changing it from a technocratic to an executive body akin to national executives (Wille 2013). In my understanding, politicization in national public spheres (hereafter: politicization), is a precondition for politicization in the other two sites. As Anchrit Wille (2012, p. 384) describes: ‘The call for a strengthening of democratic accountability of European policy-makers since the rise of the narrative on the “democratic deficit” in the EU at the beginning of the 1990s was one of the reasons of revision’. Wille however, does not specify where this ‘call’ came from. I contend that it refers to national public debates. In the next section I hypothesize the impact of politicization on Commission officials’ attitudes and policy-making by developing a theory of Commission politicization.

Part III - Hypothesizing the Impact of EU Politicization on the CommissionIn this section, I develop hypotheses on how EU politicization affects Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions and policy-making. I combine two specific literatures which (only) implicitly relate to each other: the literature on politicization (De Wilde 2011; Hooghe and Marks 2008; Rauh 2016; Statham and Trenz 2015; Zürn et al. 2012) and norm-guided open system approaches (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977). To build my hypotheses, the following paragraphs describe the open system theory and apply it to the Commission.

An open system approachOrganizations have traditionally been conceptualized as ‘rational systems’. This conception of organizations has been inspired by (a misunderstanding of) Max

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Weber’s theory of bureaucracy (Scott and Davis 2007, p. 46).2 This means that the structures of an organization guide its agents to reach certain predetermined goals as efficiently as possible (Scott 1981, p. 58). The behaviour of organizations is viewed as the result of actions performed by purposeful and coordinated agents. The role and role relations of the agents are embedded and formalized in these functional organizational structures. In contrast, Philip Selznick (1948, pp. 25-26) has argued that organizations are not solely ‘(...) formal structures in the sense that they represent rationally ordered instruments for the achievement of stated goals’ but are at the same time ‘adaptive social structures’. More concretely, organizational structures do not only affect agents, but agents also affect organizational structures with their needs, habits or commitments as developed outside of the organization (ibid. p. 26). Building on Selznick, a group of scholars have started to conceive of organizations as ‘open systems’ (Brunsson 1986; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Pfeffer and Salancik 1978; Weick 1995). In this approach, organizations are seen as being dependent on their environment for their survival. A number of theories have been proposed to describe the relationship between organizations and their environments; they can be divided in functionalist and norm-guided views. While the former assumes that organizations depend on their environment for resources or information (Aldrich and Pfeffer 1976; Lawrence and Lorsch 1967; Pfeffer and Salancik 1978), the latter supposes that organizations depend on their environment for support and legitimacy (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977). As EU politicization increasingly challenges the legitimacy of the Commission (Rauh 2016), I apply the norm-guided open system approach to the Commission rather than the functionalist approach.

The European Commission as an open systemTwo studies have applied the normative open system approach to the European Commission. Tim Balint, Micheal Bauer, and Christoph Knill (2008) reviewed different mechanisms to explain organizational change in the European Commission by comparing it to change in national bureaucracies. They argue that in the period of 1980 to 2000, the Commission has changed from a bureaucracy in the Continental tradition towards a bureaucracy leaning towards Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian traditions. Whilst none of the tested mechanisms could convincingly explain organizational change, ‘institutional isomorphism’ (DiMaggio and Powell 1983) was at least able to predict the Commission’s direction of change. Below follows a brief overview of this mechanism and how it applies to organizational change in the Commission.

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Institutional isomorphism explains organizational change by means of developments in institutional environments. Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell (1983) hypothesize that legitimacy is the major driving force of organizational change and reproduction. Organizations derive legitimacy from embracing norms and values which are widely valued and accepted in society, the so-called ‘institutional myths’ (Meyer and Rowan 1977, p. 345). Isomorphism then means that ‘(...) organizational characteristics are modified in the direction of increasing compatibility with environmental characteristics (...)’ (DiMaggio and Powell 1983, p. 149). DiMaggio and Powell (pp. 150-154) discern three mechanisms through which institutional isomorphism occurs. First, coercive isomorphism, occurs when organizations adjust their structures to those organizations on which they are legally or financially dependent. Second, mimetic isomorphism, occurs when organizations face environments with a high degree of uncertainty compelling them to imitate to organizations which are successful in the same environment. Third, normative isomorphism occurs when specific epistemic communities advocate specific approaches to policy problems, affecting organizations in the same professions. Although Balint et al. (2008, pp. 692-693) do not have the empirics to properly test all three mechanisms, they argue that all three may apply to the Commission. The Commission depends financially on the member states and can thus be susceptible to the preferences and administrative practices of the member states. Alternatively, the Commission might adopt successful administrative reforms from national bureaucracies due to the rising uncertainty, amongst others, from the unprecedented challenges of recent enlargements and the ongoing integration process. Finally, the structure of the EU could be influenced by epistemic communities that deal with European governance, promoting specific ways of governing. Christina Boswell (2008) investigates if and how different DGs have responded to the demands of their institutional environments for integrating immigration and asylum goals into the EU’s external relations. Boswell (2008) discerns four ways of responding to external pressures: full adaption, evasion, institutional decoupling, and reinterpretation, depending on the DG’s degree of political astuteness, strength of internal ideology, and the mode of deriving legitimacy. Boswell (2008) concludes that DG Justice, Liberty and Security engaged in full adaption, DG External Relations in institutional decoupling, and DG Development shifted from initial evasion to reinterpretation. The different strategies of the DGs translated into a rather incoherent list of policy goals in the 2005 Global Approach.

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Open-system theories, both the norm-guided and functionalist views, concentrate on formal organizational structures, or ‘design’, and how to explain change and continuity in them. In this dissertation, I depart from this conventional assumption of open system theories by focussing on how the environment of the organization affects the attitudes of its members, in my case, how does EU politicization affect the institutional role conceptions of Commission officials?

Politicization and Commission officials’ institutional role conceptionsAs described above, most open system approaches deal with explaining change in organizational structures and not attitudes or roles. An open system approach which focuses on the individual is Karl Weick’s (1995) theory of organizing and the process of sense making. Weick emphasizes the individual process of organizing instead of change in organizational structures. With ‘organizing’, Weick means the process of digesting information stemming from environments with the aim of reducing its equivocality. In the process of organizing, organizational agents first progress through an enactment phase (Scott 1981, p. 117). During this phase, agents define, select and create the environment to which their organization responds. In contrast to rational approaches in which individuals in similar positions behave in set ways, this approach emphasizes the semi-autonomy of individual actors and the importance of situational factors that draw the attention of individual actors. It is here where I combine the norm-guided open system approaches (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977) with the EU politicization literature (De Wilde 2011; Hooghe and Marks 2008; Rauh 2016; Statham and Trenz 2015; Zürn et al. 2012). Politicization comes along with challenges to the legitimacy of the EU polity (De Wilde 2011). With national politicians blaming the European Commission for unfavourable EU policies, public scepticism is often directed at the Commission. As norm-guided open system approaches argue, legitimacy is one of the environmental sources on which organizations depend (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Hence, out of legitimacy concerns, I expect Commission officials to respond to politicization by reconsidering their institutional role conception. In line with norm-guided open system approaches, I hypothesize that Commission officials adjust their institutional role conceptions to the norms and values prominent in their environment. Legitimacy challenges may particularly resonate in Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions as they denote the perceived status of the Commission in the EU’s institutional architecture from within the Commission. For the Commission to perceive itself as legitimate, it

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is important that Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions align with prominent norms and values in its environment. With its legitimacy challenges, politicization may therefore push Commission officials to reconsider their (predominantly supranationalist) institutional role conception. Concretely:

H2a: Politicization of the EU pushes Commission officials to adopt less supranationalist institutional role conceptions

An alternative hypothesis may be found in the work of Antonis Ellinas and Ezra Suleiman (2012). While not using the concept of politicization, they argue that Commission officials shield themselves off from the negative public opinion towards the EU. When the Commission does not obtain legitimacy from its environment, Commission officials generate ‘legitimacy from within’ so as to cognitively justify their own authority and existence. Self-legitimation then pushes Commission officials to take on, or to strengthen, their supranationalist views and, in the process, to downplay the preferences of EU citizens and national politicians.

H2b: Politicization of the EU pushes Commission officials to adopt, or strengthen their, supranationalist institutional role conceptions

In particular, I expect that Commission officials are likely to adjust their institutional role conceptions to the norms and values within their home country. This expectation is backed up by two arguments. First, politicization is mostly shaped in national debates (Hoeglinger 2016; Hutter and Grande 2014) and the rise of a pan-European public sphere remains disputed (Eriksen 2005; Koopmans and Erde 2004; Trenz 2004). Second, Commission officials remain attentive to the EU debates within their home country (Ellinas and Suleiman 2012, p. 168) and national background remains an important predictor for Commission officials’ attitudes (Bellier 2000; Hooghe 2005). Variation in politicization across the EU can then explain variation in Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions.

Politicization and policy adjustment: The constraining dissensusThe final step of this dissertation is to assess how politicization affects the policy-making of Commission officials. Due to data unavailability, I do not investigate the ‘transmission belt’ between politicization, institutional role conceptions, and

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policy-making behaviour, but I investigate the direct impact of politicization on the policy-making behaviour of Commission officials. In investigating the impact of politicization on the Commission, Christian Rauh (in Hartlapp et al. 2014; 2016) builds on a rational choice framework and so describes a pattern of Commission responsiveness along three dimensions. First, the more the general public becomes aware, and critical of, supranational policy-making, the more it is ‘rational’ for the Commission to care about the broad acceptability of its proposals. In order to ensure the continuation of the integration process, it may be in the interest of the Commission to respond to public demands, especially since public scepticism may hamper the further transfer of authorities to the EU. Second, while it is not feasible for the Commission to respond to all forms of politicization, Rauh (2016) finds that the Commission will most likely respond to the politicization of contemporaneous salient issues. Finally, when ‘contemporaneous salience’ is given, Rauh finds that the Commission is more responsive to a unified, rather than to a divided public opinion in its policy output. When there are contemporaneous salient issues on which the opinions are strongly polarized, there is more leeway for the Commission to determine its own, preferred response. To examine the effect of politicization on the policy-making behaviour of Commission officials, I compare and trace the processes of two ongoing trade negotiations: the politicized Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the depoliticized EU-Japan free trade agreement. Trade policy is one of the core competences of the EU and has mostly been governed outside of the public eye (Meunier 2003). If politicization has an impact in this policy area, we may well expect it to have consequences for other, less supranational, areas as well. As postfunctionalism has not fully theorized the ‘constraining dissensus’, Chapter V propose two mechanisms through which politicization may impact Commission officials’ behaviour. The first constraining dissensus mechanism through which public opinion is expected to influence policy is based on Principal-Agent (PA) theory (Moe 1984; Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991; Pollack 1997; Zimmermann 2004). I hypothesize that the domestic politicization of trade deals leads member states (the principals) to claim a tighter grip over the process of international trade negotiations as conducted by the Commission (the agent) through, for instance, the increased usage of the Trade Policy Committee (TPC). This leads us to the following hypothesis:

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H3a: When international trade negotiations are politicized, member states increase their control over the negotiations

The second constraining dissensus mechanism is based on the norm-guided open system approach (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977) as explained above. I argue that when trade negotiations are politicized domestically, the Commission is pressured to increase the transparency of the negotiations to protect its legitimacy, which, in turn, increases Commission officials’ exposure to immediate widespread public interests. This way, public interests trump functional interests and narrow the win set for transnational cooperation.

H3b: When international trade negotiations are politicized, the Commission is pushed to increase the transparency of these negotiations

Figure 1.2: Conceptual framework

Figure 1.2. shows the dissertation’s conceptual framework. Whereas Chapter II investigates which of the three traditional approaches can best explain Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions (career goals; re-socialization; pre-

Pre-recruitment

Career goals

Pre-Commissionsocialization

Post-recruitment

Re-socialization

Politicization of the EU

Outcome

Policy-makingbehavior

Institutional roleconceptions

Pre-recruitment

Career goals

Pre-Commissionsocialization

Post-recruitment

Re-socialization

Politicization of the EU

Outcome

Policy-makingbehavior

Institutional roleconceptions

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socialization), Chapters III and IV investigate the impact of the politicization of the EU polity, as a new explanatory variable, on Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. Finally, Chapter V assesses how politicization affects the policy-making behaviour of Commission officials.

Part IV - Data and MethodsThis dissertation assesses variation in Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions and policy-making by employing quantitative as well as qualitative methods. The quantitative part of this dissertation (Chapter II and IV) makes use of three waves of survey data (1995-1997; 2002; 2008) that capture a large range of attitudes and beliefs amongst a subset of Commission officials. Although each wave focuses on a slightly different set of attitudes, a few items (re)appear in each wave, particularly those inquiring into Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. Moreover, they also share a set of explanatory and control variables. The three waves do not form one coherent panel data set. Nonetheless, the combination of these waves provides for a unique and rich dataset and enables a longitudinal analysis of the institutional role conceptions of Commission officials. Up until now, no other study has assessed variation in Commission officials’ attitudes over time. To test my hypotheses, I furthermore use data from Eurobarometer, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES), and secondary data such as reports documenting the meetings of the Trade Policy Committee (TPC). The qualitative part of this dissertation (Chapter III and V) heavily relies on semi-structured interviews with Commission officials. Not only do they serve the exploratory purpose of these Chapters, they also complement the statistics that ‘don’t talk back’. The next paragraphs elaborate further on the methods used. The first wave (1995 - 1997) of survey data has been gathered by Liesbet Hooghe. Next to a few articles, this wave constitutes the empirical backbone for her 2001 book: The European Commission and the integration of Europe. Images of governance. The dataset consists of two parts: data from a closed questionnaire (N = 106) and semi-structured interviews (N = 104). The second wave of survey data (2001), which has also been collected by Hooghe, consists of another round of closed questionnaires (N = 102) among senior officials. This dataset has been used for her provocative 2005 article ‘Several roads lead to international norms, but few via international socialization: A case study of the European commission’. The third wave of data (2008), an online closed questionnaire (N = 1.860), has been gathered by a research team that, besides Hooghe, includes Hussein Kassim, John Peterson, Micheal Bauer, Sara Connolly, Renaud Dehousse, and Andrew

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T1.3 →

Table 1.3: Overview of data sources

Year Dataset N Source, author(s)

Dissertation chapter

1995 -1997

Closed questionnaire + face-to-face semi-structured interviews

N = 106; N = 104· Directorates-General· Deputy Directors-General· Chefs/Deputy chefs of

cabinet

Hooghe (2001)

Chapter II

2002 Closed questionnaire

N = 102· Directorates-General· Deputy Directors-General· Chefs/Deputy chefs of

cabinet

Hooghe (2005)

Chapter II

2006 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES)

N = 28 countries Hooghe et al. 2010

Chapter IV

2007 Politicization index

N = 6 countries Hutter and Grande (2014)

Chapter IV

2008 Online closed questionnaire

N = 1.860, of which 201 senior officials· Directorates-General· Deputy Directors-General· Chefs/Deputy chefs de

cabinet· Senior advisors/senior

managers

Hooghe (2012)

Kassim et al. (2013)

Chapter II and IV

Spring2008

Eurobarometer (Euroscepticism)

N = 28 countries European Commission

Chapter IV

Autumn2014

Eurobarometer(Disapproval TTIP)

N = 28 countries European Commission

Chapter IV

Spring2015

Eurobarometer(Disapproval TTIP)

N = 28 countries European Commission

Chapter IV

Autumn2015

Eurobarometer(Disapproval TTIP)

N = 28 countries European Commission

Chapter IV

2013 Semi-structured interviews

N = 21· Directorates-General· Deputy Directors-General· Director· Head of Unit· Senior advisors/senior

managers

Bes (2016) Chapter III

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Thompson. Under the project title the ‘European Commission in Question’ (EUCIQ), this group of researchers has gathered data on the backgrounds, beliefs, and careers of Commission officials. This dataset has been the empirical material for their book: The European Commission of the twenty-first century (Kassim et al. 2013). Hooghe discerns four role types; the state-centrics, the institutional pragmatists, supranationalists, and fence-sitters. Each of the institutional role conceptions is built up from the responses of Commission officials to two items: a supranationalist item: ‘Some want the College of Commissioners to become the government of the European Union. What do you think?’ and an intergovernmental item: ‘Some argue that member states – not the Commission or the European Parliament – should be the central players in the European Union. What is your position?’ Both items could be answered on a 5 point Likert scale, ranging from strongly agree (1) to strongly disagree (5). See Chapter II for the cut-off points for each type. In the quantitative part of this dissertation, the institutional role conceptions of Commission officials are measured with the use of a refined version of Hooghe’s (2012) typology. I refine the supranationalist, institutional pragmatist and state-centric categories and divide the fence sitters into leaning state-centrics and leaning supranationalists (Chapter II). Next to the quantitative analysis, this dissertation builds upon the analysis of policy documents and interview material. I conducted two rounds of interviews (October 2013 and April 2016). As the consequences of politicization on European integration (Zürn 2016) and, more particularly on the Commission (Rauh 2016) and its officials are relatively unexplored, the interviews provided a first step to explore potential causal mechanisms. Not only do the interviews help to identify empirical patterns, they also provide input for theorizing this relationship. The perceived legitimacy of Commission officials appeared to be key to understand

July 2014 – June 2016

TPC attention to EU- Japan and TTIP negotiations

N = 24 months Consilium Chapter V

2016 Semi-structured interviews

N = 12· Director· Head of Unit· Policy officer

Bes (2016) Chapter V

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attitudinal and behaviour changes. The interviews were semi-structured and, on average, lasted approximately an hour. The officials that have been interviewed varied in rank from policy officer to Director-General, and come from different DGs, ranging from Trade to Regional and Urban Policy (see Chapter III and V for the exact details).

Part V – Main FindingsThis dissertation offers a number of findings on the Commission and the politicization literatures. Chapter II shows that over a time span of 14 years, Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions have become more hetero-geneous and nuanced. This finding directly challenges the image of the European Commission as a unitary actor with one supranational preference and the idea that it is ‘hothouse for supranationalism’ (Trondal 2007). Even though supranationalism has been the most dominant view within the Commission, it is far from hegemonic. Especially the rise of the institutional pragmatist role is remarkable. In the 1995-1997 and 2008 wave, this group almost equals the supranationalists. While the state-centric group is in decline, more nuanced views like the leaning supranationalists and leaning state-centrics have been growing. Notwithstanding the explanatory value of the re-socialization and strategic calculation approaches (Connolly and Kassim 2016), Chapter II shows that national background consistently performs best over time to explain Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. The increased diversity of institutional role conceptions may be explained by the enlargement of the EU. Over these 14 years the EU expanded from 12 to 27 member states, leading to a huge inflow of officials with new national backgrounds in the Commission (cf. also Ban 2013). Moreover, the motivations for officials to join the Commission has gradually come to include more reasons than just a ‘commitment to Europe’ (Kassim et al. 2013, p. 56). While no fewer than 71 percent of the Commission officials in the EUCIQ dataset indicated that their decision to join the Commission was motivated by a commitment to Europe, other motivations that have become important are the commitment to a particular policy area and the quality of work. This dissertation therefore claims that the preferences of Commission officials cannot be simply reduced to being supranationalist. Chapter III and Chapter IV examine how the domestic politicization in the home countries of Commission officials affects their views on the Commission’s role within EU policy-making. The explorative case study of Dutch officials in

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Chapter III shows that, while they respond in different ways to politicization, Commission officials tend to reconsider their institutional role conceptions and nuance them on the basis of concerns over legitimacy and subsidiarity. With the use of a measure of Euro scepticism, Chapter IV refines this relationship and adds two surprising results. First, it is not so much Euro scepticism per se, but the salience of the EU that motivates Commission officials to change their institutional role conceptions. Second, when the EU is salient, Commission officials tend to ‘resist the tide’ and become more supranationalist, while when Euro scepticism is not salient, Commission officials ‘bend with the Euro sceptic winds’, and become more state-centric. Chapter V further explores how Commission officials deal with politicization in one of the core policy areas of the EU: external trade. I compare the politicized TTIP negotiations with the EU-Japan free trade negotiations, which escaped politicization. I show that while member states are part and parcel of the politicization of TTIP, they do not strengthen their oversight of the Commission who negotiates both trade deals on behalf of the EU. However, in line with the open system approach, the Commission has made the TTIP negotiations more transparent and aims to apply the same measures to other trade negotiations. Chapter V therefore argues that the constraining dissensus primarily works through internal reform of the Commission. However, the increased transparency only marginally affects the behaviour of Commission officials. With the notable exception of the change in the investment protection chapter, the Commission has hardly changed its positions and continues to negotiate with the United States, even though TTIP has been declared ‘politically dead’ (Gotev 2016).

Part VI - DiscussionThis dissertation shows that the Commission and its officials do not operate as an ‘ivory tower’, insulated from widespread public and political demands. In line with research on the opening up of international organizations (Tallberg et al. 2013), domestic politicization has provided an impetus for Commission officials to increase its engagement with the public. Throughout this dissertation I demonstrate that the Commission is responsive to its environment, and that Commission officials’ attitudes are sensitive to politicization. This research contributes to the debate on supranationalism in the Commission because it highlights how Commission officials’ attitudes are affected by the changing political environment as well as by personal background and organizational structures.

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This research detects a curious paradox in how the political environment shapes attitudinal change amongst Commission officials. When the EU is less salient, politicization appears to induce Commission officials to moderate their supranational institutional role conceptions. Concerns about legitimacy and subsidiarity nudge them towards a more pragmatic stance that seeks a middle ground between supranationalist and state-centric views. The growth of institutional pragmatism (Hooghe 2012) and the more nuanced views in the Commission chime well with the view that supranational organizations are not hard-wired to seek ever closer union (Hooghe 2001, pp. 115-117). In the Post-Maastricht environment, the Commission is expected to avoid proposing overly ambitious laws and Commission officials are expected to become less supranationalist (Bickerton et al. 2015; Hodson 2013). However, when the EU is salient, Commission officials tend to engage in a process of self-legitimation and adopt, or even strengthen, their supranationalist views (Ellinas and Suleiman 2012). How can we explain this paradox? This dissertation argues that politicization lays bare a deep tension between the Commission’s two sources of legitimacy: a process-based legitimacy that stems from appropriate democratic input and procedures (Føllesdal and Hix 2006) or on an output-based legitimacy that is rooted in technocratic expertise (Majone 2000; Moravcsik 2002). To increase its democratic legitimacy, Commission President Jean Claude Juncker has put ‘democratic change’ at the heart of the Commission’s political guidelines. In fact, Juncker has called his Commission the most ‘political’ one because its mandate and legitimacy is derived from the Spitzenkandidaten process (Christiansen 2016; Dinan 2016; Peterson 2016). Yet, despite moves towards ‘Better Regulation’ and the improved transparency of policy-making, the Commission remains a profoundly contested organization. While these new institutional measures increasingly open up the Commission to public scrutiny, in times of salient EU debates, Commission officials tend to disagree with public criticism and actually grow a thicker ‘supranationalist’ skin, and by doing so, heighten the tension between public and elite attitudes. The following quote of a senior Commission official exemplifies this tension in the context of the shift to IBAN for international transfers in the Single European Payment Area (SEPA):

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‘Objectively, we can show that the system is good, efficient, and faster. But, on the ground, there is a lot of resistance. In response, we could say: if the citizens and businesses do not want this new system, let’s then not install it. Yet, if we do not install it, we continue to have expensive and time consuming international transfers which makes the whole international payment system slow and expensive. So again, should we then say: 20, 30 or even 80 per cent of the citizens do not want this system – let’s not do it? Or do we say, these people should just make an effort because they will ultimately see how many benefits this brings for Europe’ (official #06).

This begs the question: why should bureaucrats be responsive to politicization in the first place? Is this even desirable? From the conventional politics-administration dichotomy conception, elected politicians should be the ones who are responsive to the public, while civil servants are expected to faithfully and efficiently executive politicians’ decisions (Overeem 2005; cf. but see Svara 1998). The European Commission, not unlike other international executives, provides a difficult case because the ‘politicians’, i.e. the Commissioners, are not directly elected by a ‘European demos’. This is one source of the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ (Føllesdal and Hix 2006). Political scientists disagree about the scope of this deficit. Giandomenico Majone (2000) and Andrew Moravcsik (2002) argue that EU officials benefit from working in isolation from politics as this guarantees long-term and ‘Pareto-optimal’ policy making. Others, such as Andreas Føllesdal and Simon Hix (2006), hold that public contestation of supranational policy-making makes EU policy-makers responsive to their environment, and thereby, the EU more democratic. A future avenue for research could be to explore whether (and when) it is desirable for Commission officials to be responsive to politicization. To conclude, the politicization of the EU polity makes the European Commission a more open institution. The Commission is often perceived as the institution that needs to be democratized in order to gain and sustain the EU’s legitimacy. The opening up of the Commission may signal the further ‘normalization’ of the European Commission in that it moves to becoming a ‘normal’ executive (Wille 2013). However, as long as the College of Commissioners is not elected, the Commission may never be fully normalized. What is more, politicization heightens the tension between competing claims of legitimacy. Does the Commission’s legitimacy depend on process or output? This put Commission officials between a rock and a hard place: should they follow the public’s wishes, irrespective of the

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output, or should they focus on optimal output and hope the public falls in line? One thing is sure: politicization is not going to go away any time soon. Against this backdrop, Commission officials will have to keep ‘reinventing’ their institutional role conceptions as they struggle to align them with their need for legitimization.

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Notes1 My thinking about the concept of politicization has greatly benefitted from the ‘politicization

of European governance’ workshop in Berlin in November 2014. I owe many thanks to the participants, in particular the organizers, Anna Leopold, Henning Schmidtke, and Pieter de Wilde.

2 As Richard Scott and Gerald Davis (2007, p. 46) argue: ‘Weber’s analysis of administrative systems can be fully appreciated only if it is seen in this larger context, since his listing of the structural characteristics of bureaucracy was generated in an attempt to differentiate this more rational system from earlier forms’.

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Chapter 2

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Chapter II

Institutional Role Conceptions of Senior Commission Officials: The Persistent Influence of National Factors

AbstractDo European civil servants become moulded into supranationalist technocrats once they set foot in Brussels? The literature offers three competing explanatory approaches to answer this question: national pre-socialization, European re-socialization, and strategic calculation. This chapter proposes a refined version of Hooghe’s (2012) typology of senior Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. It then uses this new typology to review the three approaches across three points in time (1995-1997, 2002, 2008). The empirical analysis establishes that attitudes within the Commission have become more heterogeneous over time. What is more, in line with the pre-socialization approach, it is found that national socialization factors best explain senior Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions, particularly the degree of federalism and the population size of one’s home country, and whether one has had a career within the national administration.

Keywords: European Commission; senior officials; role conceptions; pre-socialization; re-socialization, strategic calculation

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IntroductionThe European Commission is often portrayed as a ‘bastion of Europhiles’ filled with officials who are concerned only with pushing European integration forward (Brack and Costa 2012, p. 101). This particular image of the Commission has sparked a lively debate among social scientists about whether or not Commission officials are all supranational technocrats and how to explain the formation of their supposedly (supranational) attitudes (Bauer 2012; Dimitrakopoulos and Kassim 2005; Egeberg 2012; Ellinas and Suleiman 2012; Hooghe 2005; Murdoch and Geys 2012; Schafer 2014; Suvarierol 2011; Trondal 2007). However, this debate has been hampered by the paucity of data over time. Now, for the first time, we have data that can trace attitudes in the Commission at three time points: mid-1990s, 2002, and late 2008. This chapter uses these data to tackle attitude formation in the European Commission. The data consist of representative surveys of senior Commission officials conducted in 1995-1997, 2002, 2008.1 Senior officials command sizeable staff and resources, and they have regular contact with the College of Commissioners. They are in a strategic position to influence the direction of European policy, which makes this particular group of officials interesting to study. These waves have never been combined before, which has the benefit of providing a unique insight into the evolution of attitudes in the Commission over a period of momentous change in the European Union (EU). This chapter makes three contributions. First, it introduces a refined typology of Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. Although the concept of ‘role’ has been applied in various ways in the literature, a recurring element is to what extent Commission officials prefer, or identify with, a supranational Commission (Ellinas and Suleiman 2012; Dehousse and Thompson 2012; Trondal 2007). The concept of ‘institutional role conception’ as applied in this chapter refers to how officials conceive the Commission’s role within European decision-making. As officials are an integral part of the institution, their attitudes are not just ‘external perceptions’, but possibly inform individual decision-making behaviour (Juncos and Pomorska 2010, p. 6). The typology in this chapter departs from Liesbet Hooghe’s (2012) two-dimensional typology to distinguish six role types that can be arrayed along a single dimension. This new typology provides a more fine-grained, yet simpler conceptual tool to examine variation in supranational attitudes among Commission officials than Hooghe’s typology. Second, the chapter detects increased heterogeneity in Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions perceived over a 14 year period. This finding not

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only challenges the image of Commission officials as a homogenous group, but also indicates that their attitudes become more diverse over time. Third, it finds that pre-socialization provides the best explanation for understanding Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. When testing the three main approaches put forward in the literature; national pre-socialization, re-socialization in the Commission, and strategic calculation; the first one performs consistently the best. Prior national experiences tend to predispose Commission officials to particular attitudes towards the Commission. Hence, this chapter concludes that the Commission is neither a hothouse that breeds supranationalism nor a site where supranational attitudes are induced by career and bureaucratic office interest. Structured in five sections, this chapter first introduces the three main approaches to explaining EU officials’ attitudes. The following section outlines the data sources and elaborates on the methods of analysis. Hooghe’s (2012) role typology is then reviewed and revised, after which senior Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions are explored over time using this revised typology. In the fourth section a cross-wave examination of the relative influence of re-socialization, national pre-socialization, and strategic calculation on institutional role conceptions is performed. The last section concludes and suggests some avenues for future research.

Explaining Supranational AttitudesMuch research has been done on how officials working in EU institutions form their attitudes and beliefs. Not only permanent Commission officials have received attention (Ban 2013; Cini 1996; Hooghe 2005; Kassim et al. 2013; Suvarierol et al. 2013; Wille 2013; Connolly and Kassim 2016), but also Seconded National Experts (SNEs) (Murdoch and Geys 2012; Trondal 2007; Trondal et al. 2008), Commissioners themselves (Egeberg 2006; Thomson 2008; Wonka 2007, 2008), and national officials in Council groups (Beyers 2005; Egeberg 1999; Lewis 2005; Trondal 2004). Three competing explanations dominate this literature: European re-socialization, national pre-socialization and strategic calculation.

European re-socializationThe European re-socialization approach holds that EU officials are re-socialized via organizational structures into having attitudes compatible with the objectives of the organizational unit in which they operate (Egeberg 1999, 2012; Henökl 2014; Trondal 2004, 2007).2 Rooted in organizational theory, this approach

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assumes that officials do not have the capacity to process, and to know all available information, or possible outcomes of action. To reduce uncertainty about how to act, officials rely on heuristic shortcuts which are provided to them through organizational norms and incentive systems. Officials thus act according to what organizational (supranationalist) norms prescribe them, i.e. according to ‘a logic of appropriateness’ (March and Olsen 1998, pp. 952-954). This theory thus hypothesizes that each EU official is moulded into becoming a supranationalist. Four conditions are important for such re-socialization to occur. First, the length of time officials spend in the Commission is expected to contribute to supranationalism: the longer an official’s tenure, the more likely he or she is to internalize the values and norms of the organization (Checkel 2005; Suvarierol 2011, p. 195). Second, the intensity of interaction with colleagues determines whether officials are more supranationalist. Officials with frequent interactions are more likely to act according to the logic of appropriateness, as they are repeatedly exposed to the opinions of other officials (Lewis 2005; Trondal 2004). Third, the formal structure of the Commission influences Commission officials’ attitudes (Egeberg 1999, 2012). An important indicator for this is the vertical specialization of the Commission hierarchy. The higher one’s rank, the more likely one is to represent the organization as a whole, subsequently predisposing one to supranationalism. A final condition is the organizational incompatibility between the Commission and national governmental institutions (Egeberg 2006; Trondal 2007). The new cognitive scripts that officials encounter when they enter the Commission challenge them to reconsider the norms of their national institutions and to adopt new (supranationalist) views. In various publications, Jarle Trondal (2007, 2010) presents evidence for these hypotheses. Trondal however concentrates on a specific group of officials, namely Seconded National Experts (SNEs). This group consists of national or international civil servants who temporarily work for the Commission because of their particular expertise (European Commission website 2013). This group is conceived as the ‘least likely case’ to be socialized into the supranational objectives of the Commission, as they are heavily pre-socialized and are thus likely to return to their prior (inter)national positions after their contracts end (Trondal 2007, p. 1112). Trondal, who finds strong ‘actor level supranationalism’ even among SNEs, describes the Commission as a ‘hothouse for supranationalism’.

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National pre-socializationA second branch of theorizing maintains that, while socialization within (EU) institutions is a powerful predictor of an official’s institutional role conception, it is seldom able to neutralize previous socialization in his or her country or work environment (Beyers 2005; Hooghe 2005, 2012; Hofstede 2001; Kassim et al. 2013). Two reasons are put forward. First, the Commission lacks the opportunity to mould its employees in their young adult years, as most employees enter the Commission only in their late-twenties. Thus it is likely that prior experiences, usually accumulated in a national context, have already shaped political views before individual enter the Commission. This is explained by the ‘primacy effect’ - i.e. new experiences have more impact when someone has little relevant prior experiences (Sears and Levy 2003), and the ‘effect of novelty’ – i.e. when initial experiences are stronger than subsequent ones (Sears and Funk 1999). Second, Commission officials go about their job in a political context where territoriality and nationality are salient markers of interest and mobilization. As Commission officials engage with the European Parliament, the Council of Ministers, and national governments in the policy-making process, they remain attuned to national loyalties. Michael Zürn and Jeffrey Checkel (2005, p. 1067) add that no ‘independent, robust, superordinate, and strong European identity’ exists yet. Hence, national identities continue to dominate, or co-exist with, European identities, underlining the importance to include national factors in socialization research. A range of variables has been used to tap national background, three of which stand out: 1) the federal character of one’s home country, 2) the size of one’s home country, and 3) previous experience in the national administration of one’s home country.3 With regard to the first variable; officials who come from countries with a decentralized, federal structure are used to decision-making which takes place at multiple levels (Beyers and Trondal 2004; Hooghe 1999, p. 443). Hence, officials coming from such countries are assumed to be more supranationalist. The size of one’s home country matters for shaping role conceptions because small states are more vulnerable to, and dependent on, the whims of the international market than larger states (Katzenstein 1985). By joining international organizations, small states attempt to reduce the uncertainty of international markets. Hence, rather than being weakened, the sovereignty of small states is effectively strengthened when they join supranational organizations. Officials coming from small states are therefore expected to be more supranationalist .

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Lastly, Commission officials’ background, educational or professional, is expected to impact the views they hold of their institution. Trondal (2007, 2010) hypothesizes that officials with international experience should have been exposed to different ways of thinking and are expected to have a more cosmopolitan outlook, which should encourage supranational views. Hooghe (2001, 2012) finds that having gained previous work experience in a national administration predisposes officials to intergovernmentalist views. Officials with national experience have obtained certain values regarding national sovereignty, i.e. prioritizing national solutions to domestic problems over international ones, and have adopted distinctive national administrative styles (Beyers 2005, p. 912; Page 1995). Furthermore, work experience gained in national administrations has often given officials a comprehensive network in their home country. As these Commission officials may wish to return, they may consider it in their interest to defend national prerogatives (Hooghe 2012, p. 99). Hence, officials with such a background are expected to be more intergovernmentalist.

Strategic calculationOpposed to the two other approaches whose focus lies on socialization, this last explanation relies on rationalist assumptions of strategic calculation derived from the public choice literature. The overarching assumption of this approach is that human beings act in their own interest, or according to the ‘logic of consequentiality’, and thus always strive to maximize the utility of outcomes for themselves (Downs 1967; Dunleavy 1991; Niskanen 1973). The works of Fabio Franchino (2007) and Mark Pollack (2003) deserve mentioning here. The chief aim of both authors is to explain the delegation of powers by European member states to the executive bodies of the EU. Based on a principal-agent model, these authors hypothesize that Commission officials (agents) have different preferences than their principal (member states). When member states loosen control on these officials, policy initiatives will follow the preferences of the agents instead of those of the principals. Following the motivational diversity claim of Anthony Downs (1967), Franchino (2007, p. 134) and Pollack (2003, p. 35) argue that although the incentives for utility-maximization differ from person to person and from issue to issue, officials will always strive for more (EU) competences and thus become supranationalist. The supranationalist views obtained in this way contrast with how re-socialization leads to supranationalist views. The crucial difference here is temporality; re-socialization builds on the idea of the ‘cumulative experience’ one has within an

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organization, whilst strategic calculation argues that incentives and disincentives confronting an official matter at any given moment (Zürn and Checkel 2005). To operationally account for this, the re-socialization indicators should involve a time dimension, e.g. the years an official has spent within an organization. Other indicators have been used to test strategic calculation. First, officials coming from Directorate-Generals (DGs) with strong EU competences are hypothesized to be more supranational because their search for power is buttressed by the fact that they need maximum regulatory and financial authority to strengthen their position (Bauer 2012, p. 494; Hooghe 2001, p. 104). Second, officials from countries that are net beneficiaries of EU membership are expected to be more supranational. Third, officials from countries with a strong informal network in Brussels, i.e. ‘national clubness’, are hypothesized to be more intergovernmentalist. Such networks are important sources for exchanging information and hence form an important asset for professional success (Stevens and Stevens 2001, in contrast, cf. Suvarierol 2008). Lastly, in contrast to Trondal’s findings (2007), Hooghe (2001) hypothesizes that seconded national experts are more intergovernmental as they owe their selection to their home governments and most of the time are expected to return to their national government institutions. Alternatively, one could argue that bureau-maximization does not necessary translate into supranationalist attitudes towards the Commission. Officials might only want their own DG to increase in budget instead of preferring all DGs to obtain a larger budget. This chapter assumes that pushing forward the objectives of one’s own DG encourages supranationalist views because one can presume that more resources for one’s own DG is helped by more resources for the Commission as a whole. Still, to control for a possible differential salience of this rationale, the analysis includes a dummy that differentiates administrative DGs from policy DGs. Officials within administrative DGs are perceived as a least-likely case to obtain supranationalist views, as these serve as support staff and do not administer specific policy areas ‘in need’ of more competences. Hence, if strategic calculation only motivates departmental allegiances, officials from administrative DGs are least expected to hold supranationalist views.

To conclude, several researchers contend that the three mechanisms cannot be separated from each other in explaining Commission officials’ attitudes. A number of scholars argue that the supranationalist allegiances developed through re-socialization do not need to replace national identities but rather complement them (Bellier 2000; Lewis 2005; Suvarierol 2011; Zürn and Checkel 2005).

58

Also, behaviour based on strategic (supranational) calculations can eventually lead to the internalization of certain norms and values, as in order to reduce cognitive dissonance, officials have to justify their utility maximizing behaviour to themselves, leading them to adopt organizational objectives (Checkel 2005, p. 809). Furthermore, whereas Zuzana Murdoch and Benny Geys (2012) find that under certain conditions both re-socialization and strategic calculations determine the role conceptions of seconded national experts, Sara Connolly and Hussein Kassim (2016) find that both national pre-socialization and European re-socialization shape the beliefs of Commission officials. The question remains however, which mechanism predominates?

Data and MethodsDataThe dataset is composed of three waves of survey data: 1995-1997 (N = 105), 2002 (N = 93), and 2008 (n = 130).4 Each dataset inquires into the role conceptions of senior Commission officials. The term senior official refers to: Directorate-Generals, Deputy Director-Generals, Chefs de cabinet, Deputy Chefs de cabinet, senior advisors, and senior managers. The combination of these waves results in a dataset which is both unique in its coverage over time and richer than has been the case in previous studies. A limitation of the dataset is that it does not follow the same officials over time, i.e. it is not panel data. Hence, with this dataset it is not possible to perform a longitudinal analysis on how particular individuals change their role conceptions and why. Although officials have left and new ones entered the Commission, the random samples taken for each wave assure a control for idiosyncratic personal traits. All samples are tested as being representative over nationality and DG (1995-1997, 2002), and gender and age (2008). Furthermore, the sample sizes are rather large as they all cover about 25% of the population. Consequently this study can demonstrate the composition of the types of role conceptions within the Commission at three different points in time and assess which of the three mechanisms best explains these role conceptions per wave, and across all three waves.

The operationalization of the independent and dependent variablesThe operationalization of the dependent variable, a revised version of Hooghe’s (2012) typology, is explained in the results section. The independent variables are explained per wave in the appendix. Most variables draw on existing

Ch. 2

59

operationalizations (Hooghe 2001, 2005, 2012), but some variables have been recoded.

Method of data analysisThe analysis begins with reviewing and amending Hooghe’s (2012) role typology. With the use of this revised typology, the composition of institutional role conceptions per wave is assessed, which then proceeds to a multivariate analysis in which the power of each mechanism is tested. An important revision of Hooghe’s role typology is that it is treated as an ordinal scale. Hence, the analyses in this chapter are performed with the use of ordered logit models. Contrary to OLS regression, this type of regression is designed for dealing with ordinal dependent variables. An important assumption for performing ordered logit is that the relationship between the independent variables and the logits are the same for all the logits (i.e. ‘the proportional odds assumption’; Norušis 2004, p. 74). Although the proportional odds assumption holds for each wave, a closer examination of the distribution of the new five role typology shows that both intermediate ‘leaning groups’ (cf. next section) were considerably small in each wave, potentially biasing the results. The leaning groups were therefore recoded to the extreme categories (state-centrics and supranationalists respectively). Table 2.1. shows the distribution of both the three and five role typology. Analyses were done with both the new five role typology, and the somewhat rougher three role typology. The results of both analyses prove the somewhat rougher typology to be more consistent than the five role typology, showing higher levels of explained variance (Pseudo Nagelkerke). Therefore, the more detailed five role typology is used for describing the composition of institutional role conceptions in the European Commission for each wave, whereas the three role typology is used to conduct the ordered logit models for testing the three approaches to explaining institutional role conceptions.

Revisiting Commission Officials’ Institutional Role ConceptionsIn her 2012 article (on the 2008 wave), Hooghe constructs a typology of senior Commission officials’ conceptions of the Commission’s role on the basis of an index composed of the responses of senior officials to two survey items - a supranational item: ‘Some want the College of Commissioners to become the government of the European Union. What do you think?’ and an intergovernmental item: ‘Some

60

Tabl

e 2.

1: T

he c

ompo

sitio

n of

role

con

cept

ions

with

in th

e 19

95-1

997,

200

2, a

nd 2

008

wav

es fo

r the

five

role

- an

d th

ree

role

typo

logy

Wav

eSt

ate-

cent

rics

Lean

ing

stat

e-ce

ntri

csIn

stit

utio

nal

prag

mat

ists

Lean

ing

supr

anat

iona

lists

Supr

anat

iona

lists

Tota

l

Five

rol

ety

polo

gy19

95-1

997

20.4

% (2

1)2.

9% (3

)36

.9%

(38)

3.9%

(4)

35.9

% (3

7)10

0% (1

03)

2002

6.5%

(6)

2.2%

(2)

27.2

% (2

5)10

.9%

(10)

53.3

% (4

9)10

0% (9

2)

2008

5.4%

(6)

5.7%

(7)

33.7

% (4

0)15

.9%

(19)

39.3

% (4

7)10

0% (1

19)

Thr

ee r

ole

typo

logy

1995

-199

723

.3%

(24)

-36

.9%

(38)

-39

.8%

(41)

100%

(103

)

2002

8.7%

(8)

-27

.2%

(25)

-64

.1%

(59)

100%

(92)

2008

11.1

% (1

3)-

33.7

% (4

0)-

55.2

% (6

6)10

0% (1

19)

Note:

2 m

issin

g va

lues

in w

ave

1995

-199

7, 1

miss

ing

valu

e in

wav

e 20

02, 1

1 m

issin

g va

lues

in w

ave

2008

. Wav

e 20

08 is

filte

red

on D

Gs t

hat d

eal w

ith

polic

y-m

akin

g an

d se

nior

ity. I

n be

twee

n br

acke

ts is

the

num

ber o

f re

spon

dent

s.

Ch. 2

61

Tabl

e 2.

2: H

oogh

e’s (

2012

) typ

olog

y of

seni

or C

omm

issio

n offi

cial

s’ ro

le c

once

ptio

ns

Hoo

ghe

typo

logy

Des

crip

tion

Cut

-off

poin

tsSu

pran

atio

nalis

tsT

hese

offi

cial

s con

tend

that

the

Com

miss

ion

shou

ld b

e th

e go

vern

men

t of

the

EUO

ffici

als w

ho a

gree

stro

ngly

(1) o

r agr

ee (2

) with

the

supr

anat

iona

list i

tem

, and

stro

ngly

disa

gree

(5) o

r disa

gree

(4)

with

the

inte

rgov

ernm

enta

list i

tem

.

Inst

itut

iona

l pr

agm

atis

tsT

hese

offi

cial

s do

not

wan

t th

e C

olle

ge o

f C

omm

issio

ners

, or t

he m

embe

r sta

tes t

o be

the

kern

el

of E

urop

ean

gove

rnan

ce

Offi

cial

s who

disa

gree

stro

ngly

(5) o

r disa

gree

(4) w

ith th

e su

pran

atio

nalis

t sta

tem

ent,

and

disa

gree

stro

ngly

(5) o

r disa

gree

(4

) with

the

inte

rgov

ernm

enta

list i

tem

Stat

e-ce

ntri

csT

hese

offi

cial

s ho

ld th

at m

embe

r sta

tes s

houl

d be

the

cent

ral p

laye

rs in

the

EU –

‘the

foxe

s in

the

henh

ouse

’ (D

ehou

sse

and

Tho

mps

on 2

012)

Offi

cial

s who

disa

gree

stro

ngly

(5) o

r disa

gree

(4) w

ith th

e su

pran

atio

nalis

t ite

m, a

nd st

rong

ly a

gree

(1),

agre

e (2

), or

ne

ither

agr

ee n

or d

isagr

ee (3

) with

the

inte

rgov

ernm

enta

list

item

Fenc

e-si

tter

sT

hese

offi

cial

s co

nstit

ute

a ‘re

st gr

oup’

, in

tha

t th

ey d

o no

t ha

ve a

spec

ific

pref

eren

ce fo

r eith

er th

e C

omm

issio

n or

the

mem

ber s

tate

s

All

othe

r com

bina

tions

62

argue that member states – not the Commission or the European Parliament – should be the central players in the European Union. What is your position?’ Both items are answered on a 5 point Likert scale ranging from strongly agree (1) to strongly disagree (5). From this, Hooghe (2012, p. 92) discerns four types of senior officials: Supranationalists, Institutional pragmatists, Fence-sitters, and State-centrics. Table 2.2. gives an overview of the descriptions and cut-off points for these types in the 2008 dataset. The typology is presented as an intersection of two dimensions - attitudes on the power of the Commission, and attitudes towards the power of the member states - resulting in four separate types. As such, Hooghe’s typology classifies as a ‘matrix typology’ (Gerring 2012, p. 146). But does this typology actually encompass four qualitatively different groups? Do these items tap into two different dimensions? As John Gerring (2012, p. 144) explains, a typology should exist of (…) ‘discrete categories that are mutually exclusive and exhaustive on the basis of a uniform categorization principle(s)’. Assuming that the two dimensions are independent, one would not expect that these two items are correlated. To check this, a first step is to correlate the two items. A significant negative correlation is found of r = -.283, p<.01.5 This indicates that when one is pro-Commission, one is less likely to support a stronger position of the member states, and vice-versa. This result indicates that the two items are inversely related and thus can be interpreted as constituting extremes of a single dimension ranging from pro-member states to pro-Commission, along which the four types can be placed. Transforming Hooghe’s typology from a categorical to an ordinal scale produces a variable in which all types are ranked along a single meaningful dimension. This increases the possibilities and precision for statistical analyses. But where do we set the borders of the types on this continuum? And how does that influence the size of the types? These questions are answered through three additional amendments to Hooghe’s typology. In terms of operationalization, one would expect the state-centrics and the supranationalists to be the ‘mirror image’ of each other. Hooghe (2012, p. 93) admits that the ‘deck is stacked’ against state-centrics, but contends that, for the state-centrics, the meaningful divide is between those officials who reject supranationalism while not rejecting intergovernmentalism vis-à-vis those officials who do reject intergovernmentalism. Hooghe does not categorize supranationalists in the same way, i.e. officials who reject intergovernmentalism, but neither agree nor disagree with a supranationalist way of governance. Hence to increase the

Ch. 2

63

logical coherence of the operationalization, a first amendment is to shift the cut-off points of the types in such a way that state-centrics and supranationalists turn into each other’s mirror image. Supranationalist are those officials who strongly agree (1) or agree (2) with the supranationalist item and strongly disagree (5) or disagree (4) with the intergovernmentalist item, and state-centrics are those officials who strongly disagree (5) or disagree (4) with the supranationalist item and strongly agree (1) or agree (2) with the intergovernmentalist item. A second consideration is to redefine the institutional pragmatists. A pragmatist does not have a clear preference for more power to the member states or to the Commission. His or her institutional role conception will depend on the policy area, predisposing these officials to either prefer the Commission or the member states to have the upper hand. The suggested solution to this analytical confusion is to treat all instances of equal responses to both items, thus not only (strongly) disagreeing with both items, but also (strongly) agreeing with both items, as an indicator of an institutional pragmatist role conception. Likewise, when officials give nearly equal responses to the two items, i.e. ‘strongly agree’ and ‘agree’, these officials will be categorized as institutional pragmatists due to the proximity of their answers. The basic assumption underlying the institutional pragmatists is that he or she has no clear preference of the one over the other. A last consideration concerns the fence-sitter group. This rest group does not have a clear profile in Hooghe’s work. The proposed solution is to redefine this type as including both a ‘leaning supranationalist’ and ‘leaning state-centric’ type. Here officials who show a preference either for the Commission to obtain more power (1 or 2) or aversion to the member states being the central players in European governance (5 or 4), while being neutral (3) on the other item, are counted as ‘leaning supranationalists’. Vice versa the same is done for the group of ‘leaning state-centrics’. For each wave, these moderations are applied to construct the dependent variable. Figure 2.1. shows the variation in institutional role conceptions over the three waves. The first observation is that, even though the supranationalists constitute the largest group in the Commission, they are far from hegemonic. Especially in the 1995-1997 and 2008 waves, the size of the institutional pragmatists almost equals that of the supranationalists. Furthermore, the state-centrics group has been declining over time whilst the more nuanced views of the leaning supranationalists and leaning state-centrics have been growing. It can thus be said that attitudes within the Commission have become more heterogeneous. A closer look at each of the waves shows that in the 1995-1997 wave, only

64

three institutional role conceptions really mattered: state-centrics, institutional-pragmatists, and supranationalists. In fact, the state-centrics never return to this size again in the following waves. The 2002 wave marks an interesting point: the size of the supranationalists explodes from 36% to 53% while the size of the two other larger groups, the state-centrics and the institutional pragmatists, decreases. In addition, the size of the leaning supranationalists also increases from 4% to 11%. The 2002 wave thus experienced a ‘supranationalist boom’. In the 2008 wave the large supranationalist group decreases again to a size similar to that of 1995-1997.

Explaining Commission Officials’ Institutional Role ConceptionsHow can one explain the increased heterogeneity in senior officials’ institutional role conceptions? This section dives into this question by empirically testing each theory per wave, and comparing the waves to determine which theory holds best over time. Table 2.3. depicts the results of the ordered logit analysis for each theory and for each wave. It is necessary here to mention that the coefficients indicate the change in log-odds of becoming more supranationalist in relation to a baseline category, as a result of a one unit increase in the independent variable (De Vries 2009, p. 157).

Figure 2.1: Composition of role conceptions in the 1995-1997, 2002, and 2008 wave

Ch. 2

65

Table 2.3: Wave 1995-1997, 2002, 2008

IV’s Odds ratio

Coefficient (SE)

Odds ratio

Coefficient (SE)

Odds ratio

Coefficient (SE)

1995-1997 2002 2008Pre-socializationNational administration

.964 -.037 (.040)ns .886 -.120 (.051)** .898 -.107 (.041)**

Federalism 1.278 .245 (.098)** 1.334 .288 (.118)** 1.091 .087 (.030)**

Country size .976 -.024 (.014)* 1.006 .006 (.017)ns -- -- *

Transnational experience

1.047 .046 (.489)ns 1.355 .304 (.608)ns 1.290 .255 (.415)ns

Re-socializationExperience in private sector

1.063 .061 (594)ns .459 -.778 (.761)ns .759 -.275 (.429)ns

Length in Commission

1.042 .041 (.038)ns .963 -.038 (.039)ns .986 -.014 (.026)ns

Interaction in Commission

1.652 .502 (.495)ns - - - -

Position within Commission-DG-Deputy DG-Director-Advisor-Head of cabinet- Deputy head of cabinet

-DG/Deputy DG- DG Advisor/DG assistant

.150

.416

.358

-1.897 (1.075)*-.878 (1.088)ns-1.027 (.913)ns

Reference

.154

.168

.161

.211

.089

-1.872 (1.957)ns-1.781 (1.660)ns-1.823 (1.403)ns-1.554 (1.599)ns-2.424 (1.551)ns

Reference

------

1.264

------

.234 (.602)nsReference

Strategic calculationPower-DG 1.221 .200 (.114)* .910 -.094 (.174)ns .856 -.155 (.458)ns

National benefit 1.394 .332 (.228)ns 1.257 .229 (.307)ns - -

National clubness-Weak-Medium-Strong

1.8511.020

.616 (.619)ns

.020 (.676)nsReference

2.4181.826

.883 (.822)ns

.602 (.768)nsReference

---

---

Seconded national expert

.981 -.019 (.678)ns 1.068 .066 (.699)ns - -

T2.3 →

66

The 1995-1997 waveIn the first wave, national background and political ideology have the greatest impact on senior Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. First, officials coming from more federal states are found to be more supranationalist than officials coming from more unitary states. Specifically, the log odds for an official being more supranationalist (rather than institutional pragmatist or state-centric) increase by .260 for a one unit increase in the federalism scale. Second, the log odds for an official being more supranationalist decrease by .024 for a one unit increase in the size of a country. Thus, officials coming from smaller states are more supranational than officials coming from larger states. Almost none of the re-socialization factors explain senior Commission officials’ institutional role conception; including the two most important ones, length and interaction in Commission. Yet, one result is striking: the log odds for an official being more supranationalist decrease by 1.897 when this official is a Directorate-General. Directorate-Generals are thus more state-centric than officials at lower rankings. Although not significant, the negative coefficients from the other positions seem to reinforce this conclusion: the higher one’s rank, the more state-centric one’s attitude. This outcome directly challenges the tenets of the re-socialization approach. Neither do the strategic calculation factors explain senior officials’ institutional role conceptions very well, except for the type of DG. The log odds for an official

ControlsPolitical ideology-Socialist- Christian democrat

-Conservative-Liberal-Left-right-GAL/TAN

3.411.709

2.6173.669

1.227 (.588)**-.344 (.786)ns

.962 (.953)ns1.300 (.684)*

--

--

1.117

--

--

.111 (.202)ns

--

--

.867

.915

--

--

-.142 (.102)ns-.089 (.081)ns

Experience in admin DG

1.074 .071 (.473)ns .267 -1.318 (.578)ns .547 -.602 (1.038)ns

Valid N 96 89 116

Pseudo Nagelkerke

.316 .338 .225

Log likelihood 175.342 123.353 194.377

Note: p*<.10, p**<.05, p***<.01. - means ‘not applicable’, and -- means that figures are too small to report.

Ch. 2

67

being more supranationalist increase by .200 for a one unit increase in the power of his or her DG. Hence, officials from DGs with strong EU competences are more supranationalist than officials coming from DGs with weak EU competences. This outcome challenges the idea that bureau-maximization turns officials into supranationalists. Lastly, two political ideology variables are significant. The log odds for an official being more supranationalist increase by 1.227 when this official is a socialist and increase by 1.300 when this official is a liberal. Socialists and liberals are more likely to hold supranationalist views than officials with other ideological preferences. This wave partly confirms the findings of Hooghe (2001). In particular, it backs her claim regarding the importance of national background factors in explaining senior Commission officials’ role conceptions.

The 2002 waveFor the 2002 wave, national background factors are again key predictors for senior Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions whilst re-socialization or strategic calculation factors are not. The log odds for an official being more supranationalist decrease by .120 for a one year increase in the experience within a national administration. This means that officials with a background in their national administration are more state-centric than officials with no such experience. Furthermore, the log odds for an official being more supranationalist increase by .288 for a one unit increase in the federalism scale. So similar to the previous wave, officials from more federal countries are more supranationalist than officials coming from more unitary countries. Using OLS regressions, Hooghe (2005) did not find the effect of experience in one’s national administration, but did find the effect of federalism as shown here. Interestingly, in Hooghe’s 2005 article, she finds support for the effect of country size, whilst in the analysis used in this chapter this variable does not reach significance in explaining senior officials’ role conceptions.

The 2008 waveFor the 2008 wave, national background variables seem once again to best explain institutional role conceptions. The directions of the findings are in line with those in the previous waves. Table 2.3. shows that the log odds for being supranationalist decrease by .109 for a one year increase in the experience within a national administration. Again, this means that officials who enjoyed a career in their national administrations are more state-centric than officials who did not have

68

such experience. Furthermore, the log odds for being supranationalist increase by .085 for a one unit increase in the federalism scale. Concretely, officials from federal states are more supranationalist than officials from more unitary countries. These results confirm Hooghe’s (2012) analysis.

ConclusionThis chapter engages in the debate on the (formation of) attitudes of Commission officials using a fine-grained typology that arrays shades of supranationalism on an ordinal scale, and comparing survey evidence at three time points over fifteen years. Over time, senior officials’ institutional role conceptions have become more heterogeneous, more nuanced, and less structured. Furthermore, it is found that national background provides the best explanation for understanding which Commission officials are supranational, and which ones are not. More specifically, officials from federalized countries are more supranationalist, and officials who have experience in their national administrations are predisposed to having state-centric views. The analysis finds little support for the thesis that Commission officials acquire supranational attitudes in the Commission; either because they are socialized in-house, or because bureaucratic interests induce them to be supranational. The way they think about the Commission seems shaped by their national experience. At the same time, as we move from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s, national socialization weakens in explanatory power. Commission officials’ views on their institution have become less structured. These findings elicit the following paradox: how can fairly static national factors explain a growing variation in role conceptions over time? A possible solution is to analyse more fluid national factors. A suggestion for future research is therefore to assess the effects of the dynamic process of politicization of European integration (De Wilde and Zürn 2012; Rauh 2016). Politicization refers to the development in which collective (in this case European) decision-making becomes more controversial, as more issues are drawn in, leading to a larger audience (Schmitter 1969, p. 166). Ever since the referendums following the 1991 Maastricht Treaty, the public has become much more involved in EU decision-making and political parties position themselves on European matters (Hooghe and Marks 2008). The question that then arises is: does this politicized environment affect the conceptions that senior Commission officials have about what role the Commission should play in EU decision-making? EU politicization at the national level would be an interesting angle from which to further investigate the influence of national factors on senior Commission officials’ role conceptions.

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69

This analysis does not claim to definitely disconfirm the other theories tested. Only panel data can explain individual change in role conceptions. Ideally one would want to re-survey the same officials repeatedly over an extended time period. To my knowledge, nobody has attempted to do this, and so the second-best option is used here: multiple waves of representative samples that employ (virtually) the same questions. The possibility that the analysis is somehow affected by the way in which the survey questions tap supranationalism and intergovernmentalism cannot be excluded. While the questions have since been adopted in research on elite attitudes and public opinion, there are no doubt alternative formulations that researchers may want to use. Ideally, the same rigorous analysis should be repeated on other large-N datasets of Commission officials, but to my knowledge, no other datasets have been made publicly available. Still, this chapter goes beyond mere replication of prior research by Hooghe. It reviews and revises the dependent variable, senior Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions, it expands and revises some key independent variables (e.g. interaction in the Commission and experience in private sector), and it employs more appropriate statistical techniques (ordered logit). Furthermore, this chapter compares evidence from three waves of data capturing senior officials’ institutional role conceptions over time, something which has not been done before. Notwithstanding this different research design choice, this study arrives at the same conclusion: national pre-socialization, not strategic calculation or re-socialization, constitutes the strongest influence on Commission official attitudes. A promising area for future research concerns the measurement of re-socialization. As Jan Beyers (2010, p. 917) argues: ‘Instead of focusing on internalization as a key outcome of socialization process, I would shift the research focus on the socialization process itself ’. In other words, measuring socialization just by the number of years an official spends in the Commission does not suffice, as it should also include the social activities that transform officials. This chapter makes some initial steps in that direction by including measures of the interaction officials have with their colleagues, whether the new organizational environment is compatible to the previous one, and which position officials occupy within the Commission. But clearly, more can be done, and this is an important focus in future research. Notwithstanding these caveats, this chapter provides little support for the re-socialization and the strategic calculation approaches. Since the cross-wave analysis shows that national pre-socialization stands out over time in explaining senior officials’ institutional role conceptions, this chapter endorses Hooghe’s

70

claim that national pre-socialization is central to shaping the institutional role conceptions of Europe’s civil servants.

Ch. 2

71

Notes1 The first and second wave were collected by Liesbet Hooghe and funded by two Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-Canada (SSHRC) Grants: 1996 - 1999, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-Canada (SSHRC) Grant Project: ‘Inside the Monolith. Political Orientations of Senior Officials in the European Commission’; ‘Enlightened Benevolence Bygone. Senior Commission Officials’ Roles in a Changing Europe (1999-2002)’. Hooghe surveyed directors, director-generals and senior cabinet members. These data are available on her homepage. I thank Liesbet Hooghe for providing access to the interview transcripts. The third wave was part of a larger survey of European Commission officials funded by the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council (grant RES-062-23-1188) and conducted by Michael Bauer, Renaud Dehousse, Liesbet Hooghe, Hussein Kassim (co-PI), John Peterson (co-PI) and Andrew Thompson. Here I am only using data on senior officials to ensure comparability with the earlier waves. Data can be obtained by writing the principal investigators, and I thank the research team for providing access.

For further information, visit «http://www.uea.ac.uk/psi/research/EUCIQ».2 Although this chapter confines itself to the examination of supranationalism, Trondal (2007, pp. 161-162) argues that re-socialization can also lead officials to simultaneously take on ‘departmental’ or ‘epistemic’ roles. The departmental role denotes officials who are mainly concerned about interests of their portfolio, and the epistemic role denotes officials who are primarily concerned with being professional and experts in the areas for which they are hired.

3 Other national background variables that are used in the literature are the effectiveness of one’s home government and the degree to which one’s home country is protestant or catholic (Hooghe 2012; Kassim et al. 2013).

4 The sample size of the 2008 wave is 1.901, however, to maximize comparability with the other waves, only the senior officials from policy DG’s are included in the analysis. The following small and non-policy DGs were filtered out: European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO), Interpretation (SCIC), Office for Infrastructure and Logistics in Brussels (OIB), Office for Infrastructure and Logistics in Brussels (OIB), Office for the Administration and Payment of Individual Entitlements (PMO), and Translation (DGT).

5 Significantly negative correlations were also found for the 1995-1997, and 2002 wave: r = -.285, p<.01, and r = -.264, p<.05 respectively.

72

Chapter 3

Ch. 3

73

Chapter III

Europe’s Executive in Stormy WeatherHow Does Politicization Affect Commission Officials’

Attitudes?

AbstractThe politicization of the European Union has elicited a variety of views on the European polity. Public scepticism is often directed at the European Commission which is accused of being an unresponsive and illegitimate bureaucracy. How does politicization affect the institutional role conceptions of Commission officials? By building on the literature of politicization and norm-guided open system approaches, I develop theoretical propositions on how politicization may affect the institutional role conceptions of Commission officials. Grounded on the proposition that Commission officials are most likely to respond to politicization in their home country, an exploratory case study of Dutch officials (21 in-depth interviews) was performed to flesh out the mechanisms at play. The findings tentatively reveal that, in varying degrees, most officials respond to politicization by adapting their institutional role conception into a more pragmatic direction, in which subsidiarity or legitimacy concerns are central.

Keywords: European Commission; Commission officials’ attitudes; politicization; open system theory

Published in Comparative European Politics, online first June 30, 2016, DOI: 10.1057/s41295-016-0003-8

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IntroductionThe Post-Maastricht period is characterized by the politicization of the European Union (EU), engaging mass publics and domestic politics in supranational policy-making (Hooghe and Marks 2008). Much research has been done to investigate the politicization of the EU (De Wilde and Zürn 2012; Hurrelmann et al. 2013; Hutter and Grande 2014; Statham and Trenz 2015). However, little has been done to explore its impact on the attitudes of the individuals working within the European institutions (with the exception of Ellinas and Suleiman 2012; Hartlapp et al. 2014; Rauh 2016). By building on the literature of politicization and norm-guided open system approaches, this chapter develops theoretical propositions on how politicization may affect the attitudes of Commission officials towards the role of their institution in supranational policy-making, i.e. their ‘institutional role conceptions’ (Hooghe 2012; Juncos and Pomorska 2010). Whilst the main contribution of the chapter is the theoretical discussion, a preliminary exploratory case-study of Dutch Commission officials (n = 21) has been conducted which approaches the politicization-attitude nexus as a plausibility probe. The case study indicates that, albeit in different degrees, officials tend to respond to EU politicization by adapting their attitudes towards the Commission in a more pragmatic direction, in which subsidiarity and legitimacy concerns are central. My theoretical starting point is a paradox within the literature addressing EU officials’ attitude formation. Previous research underscores the importance (Bellier 2000; Beyers 2005; Cini 1996; Zürn and Checkel 2005) and persistent influence of national background in explaining the attitudes and beliefs of EU officials (Hooghe 2005, 2012)1, but also shows increased heterogeneity and nuance in Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions (Bes 2013). How can relatively static national factors, such as the degree of federalism, population size, or a country’s dominant religion, explain change in Commission officials’ attitudes? This paradox suggests that we have to look at the influence of more ‘fluid’ national factors to account for the variation in Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. Inspired by the postfunctionalist hypothesis that politicization constrains European policy-making (Hooghe and Marks 2008, p. 9; but see Schimmelfennig 2014), I theorize that concerns about the legitimacy of their organization lead Commission officials to be responsive to politicization. More specifically, as politicization is found to be shaped in national settings (Hutter and Grande 2014; Hoeglinger 2016), I explore whether, and how, Commission officials are influenced by the politicization in their home countries. If nationality remains an important reference point for forming attitudes, Commission officials may be affected by the politicization in their home

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countries. Furthermore, assuming that Commission officials are most likely to respond to politicization when it has a distinctively Euro-critical character, a preliminary case study is conducted that explores whether the increasingly critical Dutch EU debate (Lubbers and Scheepers 2010; Lubbers and Jaspers 2011) affects the institutional role conceptions of Dutch Commission officials. The chapter proceeds as follows. Building on the literature on politicization and norm-guided open system approaches, a first attempt is made to theorize the impact of EU politicization on Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. The second section explains the case study research design. Then, the results section presents the findings of the case study which is concluded by discussing the implications for the theoretical framework on Commission politicization.

The European Commission: An Ivory Tower?The theory on Commission politicization builds on two specific literatures which (only) implicitly relate to each other: the literature on politicization (De Wilde 2011; Hooghe and Marks 2008; Rauh 2016; Statham and Trenz 2015; Zürn et al. 2012) and norm-guided open system approaches (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977). Both traditions are illuminated below.

The politicization of the European polityIn 1969, Philippe Schmitter proposed three neo-functional hypotheses on the course of international integration, of which the last was the ‘politicization hypothesis’. As international integration continues to spill over to a widening range of policy areas, national actors increasingly find themselves immersed in more controversial, rather than purely technical, areas of supranational policy-making. Schmitter (1969, pp. 165-166) hypothesized that this development will lead to a wider audience being interested and actively involved in regional integration. Research confirms that European integration has become subject to a growing number of actors, not least national publics, marking the demise of what Leon Lindberg and Stuart Scheingold (1970) called the ‘permissive consensus’ (Franklin et al. 1994; Hooghe and Marks 2008; Kriesi et al. 2008). The times in which the EU was only a matter for insulated political and economic elites came to an end with the ratification of the 1991 Maastricht Treaty which permanently put the EU on the national public agendas. Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks (2008, p. 5) denote the present situation as one of a ‘constraining dissensus’. Political parties and national publics increasingly speak out on issues related to the EU. Dissatisfied with the EU’s nascent authority and the citizens’ lack of influence on supranational

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policy-making, politicization challenges the nature of the EU polity itself and raises the question of its legitimacy (De Wilde 2011; Statham and Trenz 2015; Zürn et al. 2012). Fed by the EU’s democratic deficit and national leaders shifting the blame for unpopular national policies to the European level, scepticism is often targeted at the Commission, making the EU’s executive rather ‘unloved’ (Dinan 2010, p. 171; Ellinas and Suleiman 2012, p. 154). How do Commission officials respond to a more aware and critical environment? Antonis Ellinas and Ezra Suleiman (2012, pp. 32-33) address this query. They argue that when bureaucracies are not recognized by their environment, they tend to shield themselves off and generate ‘legitimacy from within’. This is part of a bureaucracy’s inherent survival strategy so as to justify its authority and existence, which is denoted as ‘self-legitimation’. Ellinas and Suleiman expect that an important narrative for Commission officials’ self-legitimation involves the idea that they serve the interests of ‘future Europeans’, justifying them to downplay the preferences of present citizens and their political masters. The authors indeed find that, as a response to their more hostile environment, EU officials ‘closed the ranks’. The process of self-legitimation then pushed Commission officials to take on, or strengthen their, supranationalist views. In explaining the Commission’s policy-making, the work of Christian Rauh (2016) and Dominika Biegoń (2013) seemingly contradict the findings of Ellinas and Suleiman (2012). Whilst Biegoń (2013) describes the Commission’s ‘external legitimation strategies’, Rauh (2016) finds that Commission officials respond to the general politicization of the EU selectively, that is, when it coincides with the contemporaneous salience of particular regulatory issues. Based on the rationalist assumption that the Commission is a ‘competence-seeking actor’ (Pollack 2003), Rauh argues that a response to the politicization of salient issues increases the output legitimacy of the Commission and prevents a negative public evaluation which might hamper the further transfer of national competences to the European level (Hartlapp et al. 2014, pp. 229-230). Both studies illustrate that, under specific circumstances, the Commission opens up for politicization and seeks legitimacy from its environment. Building upon these insights, I explore to what extent challenges to the legitimacy of the EU in the environment of the Commission affects the attitudes of individual officials working inside the Commission. To theorize this relationship, I link the findings in the politicization literature to an open system approach to organizations as developed in American sociology in the 1950s.

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The European Commission as an open systemAs informed by Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy and Herbert Simon’s (1965) theory of administrative behaviour, organizations were for a long time perceived as ‘rational systems’. The adjective ‘rational’ denotes that organizations are designed in such a way that they seek to efficiently obtain certain predetermined goals (Scott 1981, p. 58). Organizational structures direct organizational agents accordingly. The behaviour of agents then becomes ‘formalized’, i.e. the rules governing behaviour are precisely and explicitly formulated, leading to clear expectations on specific roles and role relations, which are independent of the background of the individuals who occupy positions in the structure. Sociologist Philip Selznick (1948, pp. 25-26) was one of the first scholars to argue that organizations are not solely ‘(...) formal structures in the sense that they represent rationally ordered instruments for the achievement of stated goals’ but are at the same time ‘adaptive social structures’. Concretely, organizational members do not blindly follow ‘rational’ organizational structures but also influence structures as they are co-driven by personal needs or personality, and bring along a set of established habits, or commitments to special groups outside of the organization. Building on the ideas of Selznick, a range of scholars have come to conceive organizations as ‘open systems’ (Brunsson 1986; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977; Pfeffer and Salancik 1978; Scott 1981; Weick 1995). The central idea is that organizations are dependent on their environment for their survival and hence adjust organizational structures to their environment (Scott 1981, p. 110). Two streams can be discerned. First, a functionalist view: organizations depend on their environment as it provides them with resources or flows of information (Aldrich and Pfeffer 1976; Lawrence and Lorsch 1967; Pfeffer and Salancik 1978). Second, a norm-guided view: organizations depend on their environment because it provides them with support and legitimacy (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977).2 As John Meyer and Brian Rowan (1977, p. 343) contend, the latter view leads to formal organizational structures being influenced by ‘public opinion, the views of important constituents, by knowledge legitimated through the educational system, by social prestige, by the laws, and by the definitions of negligence and prudence used by the courts’. Norms and values that are widely recognized in an organization’s environment thus have the ability to influence organizational design. The norm-guided view anticipates that the politicization of the EU polity should make the Commission more open to its environment. Indeed, ever since the call for

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democratic decision-making during the 1990s, the Commission has made several efforts to strengthen its relations with the public. Anchrit Wille (2013) describes how the Commission experiences a process of ‘normalization’, which means that it slowly develops into an executive that shares many of the features of national executives, including a stronger link between the composition of the European Parliament (EP) and the College of Commissioners. A compelling example is the nomination by each major political group in the EP of a Spitzenkandidat for the post of Commission president during the 2014 European elections (Hobolt 2014). As a general move to improve legitimacy, various reforms have been introduced to promote openness, transparency, and responsiveness (Biegoń 2013; Cini 2008; Haverland 2014; Hüller 2007; Mastenbroek et al. 2014). The introduction of, for example, the impact assessment system in 2002, the European Transparency Initiative in 2005, the ‘Yellow Card Procedure’ in 2009, the Citizen’s initiatives in 2010, and the REFIT (Regulatory Fitness and Performance Programme) program in 2013, indicate that the Commission seeks to operate as an open system rather than an ‘ivory tower’. Whereas most open system theories start from a structure-based conception of organizations, Karl Weick’s (1995) model of organizing puts the focus on organizational agents. With ‘organizing’, Weick refers to the individual process of digesting information stemming from environments with the aim of reducing its ‘equivocality’, or uncertainty. In this process, organizational agents first progress through an enactment stage in which they select and interpret their environments, after which they collectively ‘make sense’ of the environment (Scott 1981, p. 117). Public opinion might be of importance here. As Dimiter Toshkov (2011, p. 137) argues: ‘Commission officials might be ideologically predisposed to propose fewer EU rules if they perceive that the public legitimacy of the EU is low’. Likewise, Arndt Wonka and Berthold Rittberger (2011) describe that next to professional and social accountability, public approval is considered to be important for explaining the attitudes of EU agency staff. Weick’s emphasis on the semi-autonomy of individuals and the potential of public opinion to influence EU officials’ attitudes, suggest that Commission officials’ may respond to EU politicization by reconsidering their institutional role conceptions.

Theorizing the impact of politicization on Commission officials A theoretical framework on Commission politicization can then build on two assumptions. First, the Commission depends on its environment for self-

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preservation. The key concept here is ‘legitimacy’. The concept of legitimacy as applied in this chapter does not refer to the actual conferral of authority on the Commission by EU citizens, or the public acceptance of the Commission’s right to govern (Barker 2001, p. 43), but rather to whether the Commission conceives itself as legitimate as based on widely recognized norms and values in its environment. Second, not only the organizational structures of the Commission adjust to its environment, but also the individuals within the Commission. Although focusing on politicians instead of bureaucrats, previous research confirms the importance of individuals’ conception of their organization’s legitimacy in discussions about legitimacy (Barker 2001; Zaum 2013). An important attitude in which legitimacy concerns may resonate is in Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions.3 Institutional role conceptions refer to the attitudes Commission officials have towards the role of their institution within EU policy-making. Hooghe (2012) discerns a number of institutional roles ranging from the supranationalist view that the Commission should be the government of the EU to the state-centric view that the Commission should act like any other international secretariat. Institutional role conceptions thus indicate the perceived status of the Commission in the EU’s institutional architecture from within the Commission. As Commission officials are an integral part of the Commission, their attitudes are not just ‘external perceptions’, but have the potential to inform individual decision-making behaviour. For the Commission to conceive itself as ‘legitimate’, it is important for Commission officials to perceive the role of the Commission to be consistent with prominent norms and values in its environment. When the way the Commission operates in EU decision-making is compatible with the norms and values held high in its environment, then the Commission, and Commission officials, can perceive themselves as performing a legitimate job. If we assume the Commission to be an open system, the politicization of the EU and the general public questioning the legitimacy of the EU polity that it involves can be expected to affect Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions (De Wilde 2011, p. 560). With its prominent role in EU decision-making, criticism is often directed at the European Commission and its scope of powers. Such a situation may expose a gap between the institutional role conceptions of Commission officials and the norms and values in their environment, pushing them to reconsider their role conceptions. However, Commission officials are not passive recipients of all prevalent, and possibly contradictory, norms and values within the Commission’s complex environment. Hence, to what part of the Commission’s environment do EU officials respond and justify their organization?

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This chapter suggests that Commission officials are likely to adjust their institutional role conceptions to the norms and values within their home country. This assumption is informed by two kinds of considerations. First, politicization mostly plays out in national debates and the emergence of a pan-European public sphere continues to be disputed (Eriksen 2005; Koopmans and Erde 2004; Trenz 2004). Different degrees of politicization within the member states may hence explain variation in institutional role conceptions between officials with different national backgrounds. Politicization in one’s home country can be an important reference point for shaping particular attitudes on, in this case, what the role of the Commission should be in the overall European decision-making process. Indeed, despite their long absence from home, it has been found that officials remain attentive to the EU debates in their home country (Ellinas and Suleiman 2012, p. 168). Second, previous research argues that relatively static, national background factors are important for explaining the attitudes of EU officials (Bellier 2000; Beyers 2005; Hooghe 2005). Yet, at the same time, Bart Bes (2013) shows that Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions have become increasingly more diverse and nuanced. This chapter hence turns to EU politicization in national debates as a ‘fluid’ national factor to account for this increased variation in Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. The key proposition of this chapter is therefore that Commission officials alter their institutional role conceptions to the norms and values in their home country. When national debates demand a more pro-active Commission, officials will adjust their views on the Commission in a more supranationalist direction, whereas when national debates call for less EU interference, Commission officials will endorse a more pragmatic or state-centric view of the Commission. Analytically, the mechanism by which politicization may prompt a change in Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions can be conceived as involving three cognitive steps (cf. Petty and Cacioppo 1986). First, Commission officials’ need to perceive the politicization in their home country. I argue that politicization that has a Euro sceptic direction has most potential to trigger the attention of Commission officials. Second, when Commission officials perceive politicization, they will either decide to not attach any value to it, or to evaluate it, both in terms of how issues are politicized, as well as the desirability of politicization as such. Finally, strong positive or negative feelings about how issues are politicized may lead to a reconsideration of what the role of the Commission should be in EU policy-making, potentially leading to a change in Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. Assuming that politicization is often related to Euro scepticism, two

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things are important to consider. First, one’s current institutional role conception. Commission officials who have a more state-centric view may be strengthened in their institutional role conception, whereas Commission officials who have more supranationalist institutional role conceptions may nuance their views on the Commission. Second, a large public-elite gap has most potential to evoke a psychological tension between how Commission officials view the Commission and how they feel their institution is valued in their home country. Hence, the larger the public-elite gap, the more likely it is that Commission officials adjust their institutional role conceptions. Whilst the primary objective of this article is to explore whether and how Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions are affected by the politicization in their home country, i.e. ‘the key proposition’, it is beyond the scope of this article to systematically analyze each of the steps mentioned. For the exploratory purpose, I perform a single-case study.

An Exploratory Case StudyCase study designTo explore whether and how Commission officials respond to the politicization in their home country, I conducted a single-case study. Although case studies are not able to estimate causal effects or probabilities, they help in identifying and understanding potential causal mechanisms (Gerring 2004). They contribute to the accumulation of knowledge on a particular topic, which may ultimately lead to generalizations about the causal effect (Lijphart 1971). An exploratory study on how politicization may affect the institutional role conceptions of Commission officials hence benefits from this type of research design. Assuming that Commission officials are more likely to respond to EU politicization when it has a clearly Euro-critical character, the Dutch Commission officials make a good case. Ever since the 2005 Dutch ‘Nee’ to the referendum on the European Constitution, and the outbreak of the 2009 European sovereign debt crisis, Euro sceptic attitudes (Lubbers and Scheepers 2010; Lubbers and Jaspers 2011) and public distrust in the European Commission (Eurobarometer 2014) have been on the rise in the Netherlands. During the fall of 2013, 21 interviews, varying in length from half an hour to one and a half hour, were specifically conducted for this study, of which 16 face-to-face in Brussels and five by telephone. The interviews were taped under the condition of strict anonymity. While some questions were taken from the study of Hussein Kassim et al. (2013) to allow for comparability, the majority

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were specifically designed for this study. This sample was selected from all Dutch officials occupying middle to senior management positions (N = 328, European Commission 2014). The sample includes officials from different ranks and ages, however, male officials are overrepresented. With a sample average of 20 years of service, most interviewees experienced the shift from permissive consensus to constraining dissensus within the Commission in the 1990s, and the 2004 ‘big bang enlargement’. Table 3.1. shows an overview of the sample’s length of service, gender, and position.

Table 3.1: Sample overview: length of service, gender, and position in organization

Length of service

< 1992 1993 - 2004 2005 > Total

Gender Male 11 5 1 17

Female 0 3 1 4

Total 11 8 2 21

Position NDirector-General/Deputy Director-GeneralDirectorHead of UnitOtherTotal

4

3122

21

Note: The sample has a M of 19.67 years of service with a minimum of 2 years and a maximum of 30 years.

Interview methodologyThe interviews were semi-structured which enabled me to maintain an open mind about alternative, or complementary sources of politicization. The interviews were aimed to assess if, and how Commission officials perceive politicization, and whether it leads to a reconsideration of their institutional role conception. The questionnaire left considerable scope for the interviewees to indicate if they perceive a different political environment or not. The questionnaire was organized around four parts. The first part inquired background factors such as education, work, and international experience. This section was concluded by asking the interviewees for their prime motivation to work for the Commission.

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The next section gauged the officials’ current role conception of the Commission. A hand-out was given to the interviewee depicting two statements. ‘Some people want the College of Commissioners to become the government of the European Union. What do you think?’ (a supranationalist item) and ‘Some argue that member states, not the Commission or the European Parliament, should be the central players within the European Union. What is your position?’ (a state-centric item). Both items were answered on a five-point Likert Scale ranging from Strongly agree (1) to Strongly disagree (5). The interviewees were asked to score both items and to elaborate their choices. Both statements were derived from Hooghe’s (2012) research on Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. Broadly, three specific ‘role types’ can be discerned from these two statements; supranationalists, institutional pragmatists, and state-centrics. Each type has a different way of conceiving the role of the Commission within the EU decision-making process. The third section of the interview explores in which ways officials are exposed to EU politicization. Three broad themes were covered: politicization in the Dutch media, politicization through external contacts, and politicization in one’s daily work. The fourth part assessed retrospectively whether or not officials changed their institutional role conception due to the EU politicization in their home country, what other factors might have contributed to this, and how they would have scored the Hooghe (2012) items at the beginning of their career (see the appendix for the complete interview guide).

The Predominance of the Institutional PragmatistThe ‘institutional pragmatist’ view (n = 19) is dominant in this sample. Institutional pragmatists defend the current institutional EU setup, i.e. ‘the community method’, as codified in the Treaties (Hooghe 2012). The Commission, the Council, and the European Parliament (EP), are all key players within the European decision-making process, but each with its own specific role. Institutional pragmatists stress the need for a ‘non-hierarchical’ co-operation between the Commission and the member states. A typical institutional pragmatist response is:

‘(…) I think, as the Commission is positioned now, i.e. to defend and look after the interests of Europe, that is fine. But the politics, and determining the steps forward, that should be done in close cooperation with the member states. We should not think that we should regulate everything from Brussels. (…). The current model has a good balance: the

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Commission has the right of initiative and a vision, whereas the member states and the European Parliament together decide upon our proposal’ (official #06).

Institutional pragmatists have two sets of reasons for their defence of the status quo: legitimacy and functionality. Institutional pragmatists emphasize the central role of the member states and their populations as main principals of the EU. The scope of the Commission’s powers should depend on the policy area at hand: the Commission should only focus on those areas in which it has a ‘clear added value’. The Commission does not have the same democratic legitimacy or political basis as national governments. A ‘European government’ in the form of the Commission can therefore not be justified, and ‘will strongly undermine the public support for European integration’ (official #12). As such, member states’ support for further integration is crucial to ensure ‘democratic legitimacy’. The Commission has an indispensable function however, as member states are only concerned about their own national interests: ‘The member states are there for themselves. And only for themselves. The Commission and the EP look at the European dimension (…)’(official #15). It is therefore vital for the Commission to maintain strong relationships with the member states, not only for reasons of legitimacy, as mentioned above, but also to obtain an oversight of what goes on within the member states. From this, the Commission distils what is good, necessary, and feasible for ‘Europe as a whole’. The sample included only two supranationalists (officials #07; #17). Hooghe (2012, p. 90) defines supranationalism as the idea that ‘authority is vested in the College of Commissioners, which provides political guidance. Commission officials’ should defend the Commission’s role as Europe’s executive and help usher in a federal Europe’. Although neither of the officials mentioned the term ‘federal Europe’, they underscore the leading role of the Commission within EU decision-making rather than the non-hierarchical relationship between the Commission and member states as advocated by institutional pragmatists. The Commission should politically lead the EU, as member states are incapable of doing so. Member states are not interested in (the necessary) European solutions but only in their own national interests, thus impeding further European integration.

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Exposure to EU PoliticizationPoliticization in the Dutch media Next to international news outlets, most Dutch officials use Dutch sources for their news consumption, and thus are up-to-date on, and have an interest in, the Dutch EU debate. As one official puts it: ‘I think it is an important responsibility for any Dutch senior EU official to know what goes on within the Dutch society’ (official #20). Without exception, all interviewees perceive the increased visibility of the EU debate in the Netherlands. Except for three officials (officials #16; #18; #19), most Dutch officials think the Dutch debate on the EU is of a low quality. This leads to disappointment and, in some cases, even outright frustration; ‘I am ashamed of what happens in the Netherlands. It is a populist debate in which the level of factual knowledge is extraordinary low’ (official #17). Most officials describe the Dutch debate as ‘fierce’, ‘overly critical’, ‘misinformed’, ‘shallow’, ‘short-sighted’, ‘polarizing’, and ‘short of sound argumentation or analysis’. Officials argue that, in this Euro sceptic climate, national politicians hardly address the advantages of EU membership as they fear electoral losses, or feel that they have to go along with the Euro sceptic tone set by Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party.

Politicization through external contactsApart from three officials who indicate to have limited contacts with Dutch stakeholders (officials #02; #08; #11), most officials claim that politicization has not altered their contacts with Dutch stakeholders. Dutch actors, whether civil servants or companies, come to the Commission because they have a specific interest. They do not seem to be influenced by the more Euro sceptic climate: ‘The sad thing is that Euro sceptic actors are not so interested in sharing their scepticism with people who actually participate in the European decision-making process’ (official #20). The Dutch civil service is described as being reasonably interested in Europe, even though their political masters and objectives have become more EU sceptical. Only one official describes how the contacts with Dutch civil servants have become less intense due to the more EU critical stance of Dutch politicians (official #06), while another official notes that the Dutch officials want to know more than before (official #18). Official #14 adds: ‘Generations of civil servants who weekly come here (…), have created civil servants who know a lot more about Europe (…). Member states now give counter-replies and ask why certain actions are needed’. Although it makes decision-making somewhat more difficult, this official perceives this as a positive development.

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Some officials mention how EU politicization can be noticed in their personal environment (officials #02; #05; #11; #15; #16). ‘When I am in the Netherlands and get involved in discussions about pro or anti EU (…) I am immediately pushed in the defence, and have to respond to arguments which do not have much factual basis’ (official #02). Some officials mention having heated debates with their families about the EU (officials #02; #15).

Politicization in daily-workAlthough nine officials indicate that they are not directly exposed to EU politicization in their daily-work (officials #02; #05; #07; #11, #13; #16; #17; #18; #19), most officials describe how the atmosphere in the Commission has changed: the Commission has become more ‘responsive to the outside world’. The ‘subsidiarity’ or ‘political feasibility’ questions are now more explicitly asked within the house. Three broad reasons are: enlargement, which requires more coordination and generates a greater variation in institutional role conceptions; the Commission’s closer lines of accountability with the European Parliament (EP) since the Lisbon Treaty; and the expansion of EU policy into areas more directly affecting the sovereignty of member states and the lives of EU citizens. This context pushes EU officials to consider more critically which issues are better handled at the EU level and which ones are better dealt with at the national level. Only three officials contend that political feasibility is solely a matter for the Commissioners and their cabinets (officials #09; #11; #18). A number of officials draw a connection between the changing ways of policy-making and the Commission’s more sceptical environment. In line with Rauh (2016), two officials contend that the environment increasingly influences the Commission’s agenda-setting in the sense of determining what is ripe or not and how a proposal is made (officials #01; #10). Officials describe how the leadership of the Commission, as embodied by president José Manuel Barosso and the Secretary-General, steers the Commission to only focus on a few key priorities: ‘We should only make proposals which are a) important and b) have a big impact and added value for Europe (…). And ‘(…) I think this program [REFIT] was a clear answer of Barosso and the Secretary-General to (…) the Euro sceptics in Europe, indicating that: yes we have heard you’ (official #05). Some officials evaluate the more critical atmosphere in the Commission positively, whilst others increasingly see this as a constraint on their daily-work: ‘While before, everyone looked with admiration to Europe, now I am asked, why do you actually come with this proposal? Do we need it? There is a sort of suspicion (…)’ (official #10).

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Finally, four officials indicate an increased hesitance towards European integration on the part of governments (officials #03; #06; #14; #20). This has made decision-making more difficult because member states are less eager to participate in European projects as they fear a negative press at home. Two out of the four officials are clearly unhappy with this situation: ‘It is a shame and it has meant that negotiations and policies are often, maybe too often, led by the question; but what will the “citizen” think of this?’ (official #06). In contrast, two officials argue that although the Dutch politicians engage in a blame game, they adopt a much more positive or constructive attitude towards European integration in their actual behavior at EU summits (officials #08; #15).

Changing Role Conceptions: Assessing the Impact of PoliticizationUltimately we turn to the question: did officials reconsider their institutional role conception because of EU politicization in their home country? Below the officials’ diverse ways of reacting to their changing environment are described.

The non-convertsOver half the sample, i.e. twelve officials, indicate that although the debate in the Netherlands does not pass the Commission unnoticed, it did not make them change their institutional role conceptions (officials #01; #02; #05; #08; #09; #10; #12; #15; #16; #19; #20; #21). Still, five of these officials admit to have become more critical of the Commission’s range of activities (the ‘critical non-converts’: officials #01; #08; #09; #15; #20): ‘I see it as positive development that we have abandoned the reflex that in all areas more Europe is better than less’ (official #01). As they contend, this is not only because of EU politicization in the Netherlands, but within all of Europe. Other factors mentioned are the more critical atmosphere within the Commission, personal experience, the economic crisis, the way in which the Commission leadership steers towards key priorities, the growth of the EU and the unnecessarily large number of Commissioners, the failure of the Commission to explain its policies better, and the increased role of the EP after the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. One official wonders whether the impact of politicization is not primarily a mental perception: ‘I think the problem is a bit more psychological. A lot of people scold the EU (...), so our skins have to grow “thicker” (…)’ (official #15). Two officials (officials #16; #19) are outright positive about politicization: ‘(…) It is fantastic that people finally talk about the EU (...). I sometimes hear from

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Dutch colleagues; “oh, we are so negative”, but I do not think it is so bad. I think it is healthy and not extraordinary’ (official #19). One high-ranked official who indicates to always have had a ‘healthy’ critical view towards the EU, is put off by the tone of the debate: ‘The Dutch discussion annoys me, literally annoys me, because of the lack of good arguments about Europe’ (official #10). Four officials contend to have become a bit more ‘realistic’ about European decision-making as a result of their experience (officials #02; #05; #12; #21). Their view on the role of the Commission has not changed because of EU politicization. As official #02 explains: ‘For sure, officials follow what happens in their own member state, and that also colours the way they look at certain things, after all, it is still your home base. But the influence is also relative’. For most officials, the daily reality within the organization is more important and national background, as reflected in the Dutch discussion on the EU, does not seem to be terribly significant for these officials’ institutional role conception. Interestingly however, this view is not uniformly shared. One official #12 argues: ‘When we work on legislation, unconsciously you depart, because that is simply your frame of reference, from the Dutch situation. You will be less inclined to write a piece of legislation which requires very big changes in the Netherlands’. In sum, although twelve officials reportedly did not change their role conception, five among them have become more concerned about the subsidiarity question. EU politicization is a background factor.

The reinforced believersFive officials indicate that their view on the role of the Commission has been strengthened by politicization (officials #03; #04; #11; #13; #17). Three ‘reinforced institutional pragmatists’ indicate that politicization has made them more critical of what the Commission should or should not do which, contrary to the five ‘critical non-converts’, confirms and makes them more conscious of their own institutional role conception (officials #04; #11; #13) - ‘(…) these discussions have only strengthened my idea that the Commission should concentrate itself more on those issues which have a real European dimension’ (official #11). Although all ‘convinced officials’ agree that the Dutch debate is of a low quality, three of them try to perceive politicization positively, in the sense that it pushes one to think about the EU’s reach (#03; #11; #13). The other two close themselves off from the Dutch EU debate and as such strengthen their role conception (#04; #17). One of these officials is one of the two supranationalists (official #17).

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‘The converts’: From supranationalism to institutional pragmatismThree officials changed from supranationalist to institutional pragmatist (officials #06; #14; #18). All three have become more critical towards the scope of the Commission’s policy fields and indicate a growing appreciation of the member state level. Official #18 however indicates that his change has not been caused by the EU politicization in the Netherlands, but rather because of his experience in-house. He has reached the conclusion that some issues are better handled at the level of the member states. The other two converts hold that their conversion has been (co)-determined by the EU politicization in the Netherlands. One official describes a continuing ‘emotional bond’ with the Netherlands even though he spends most of his time in Belgium. On the question of whether the Dutch debate led to a change in role conception, official #14 answered:

‘When I started here, I think I would have answered that the Commission should become the government of the EU, (...) while now, I think that there should not be a hierarchy or antagonism between the Commission and the member states. (...) I think that the biggest challenge for the Commission for the coming decade is to do less. In that sense I have a great understanding of the Dutch point of view.’

Another official explains that it is not just the politicization in the Netherlands, but also the politicization in other countries that has influenced the official’s institutional role conception (official #06).

The discouraged supranationalistFinally, one official describes how he has become a little bit less supranationalist as a result of politicization: ‘Everyone is influenced by national debates, if you are not influenced by them, then you are either deaf or blind’ (official #07). And: ‘Five years ago, I would have said “strongly agree” to the first item, and on the second one, I would have been a bit more optimistic regarding the member states’ (official #07). Although official #07 makes a strong case for how EU officials are influenced by national debates, in the end, this official’s own role conception changed only marginally.

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ConclusionsThis chapter offers a first theoretical discussion of how politicization of the EU polity affects Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. The theoretical framework assumes that the Commission depends on its environment to obtain legitimacy and that politicization, which challenges the EU’s legitimacy, may push Commission officials to reconsider their institutional role conceptions. In particular, I assume that this effect is triggered by the politicization in Commission officials’ home countries. The theoretical propositions were evaluated by way of an exploratory case study of Dutch Commission officials (n = 21). Although only three officials can be regarded as actual ‘converts’, changing from supranationalism to institutional pragmatism, 11 other officials (five reinforced believers, one discouraged supranationalist, and five critical non-converts) became more pragmatist. Challenging Ellinas and Suleiman (2012), this study tentatively reveals that, in varying degrees, politicization pushes Commission officials to adjust their institutional role conceptions in a more pragmatic direction. Consistent with the propositions put forth, attitudinal changes are informed by legitimacy and subsidiarity concerns, but also to some extent by functional optimality, i.e. the need for a ‘non-hierarchical relationship’ between the Commission and the member states in the EU’s institutional architecture. However, contrary to our initial expectation that national background strongly shapes institutional role conceptions, the interviews show that Dutch Commission officials’ pragmatism is not just motivated by a more critical Dutch EU debate, but also by EU politicization in other member states. Officials also pinpoint other factors, such as enlargement, the stronger position of the EP, and the economic crisis. So although Commission officials may be keen to follow and understand the EU debate in their home country, the effect of politicization is not particularly nationally-bound. The self-assessments and retrospective questioning of Commission officials might have influenced the study’s internal validity. Nonetheless, this study shows that Commission officials are affected by the more Euro-critical public and political environment. As Commission officials go about their job against the backdrop of politicization, will they continue to see themselves as the engine of ‘European integration’? Future research can explore the politicization-attitude relationship further. With the use of advanced statistical techniques or experiments, follow-up studies can test whether the relationship holds over a larger population of Commission officials and further specify the politicization-attitude mechanism and the role of nationality. For example, are Commission officials particularly sensitive to

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politicization in the largest member states, such as Germany and France? Does one’s Directorate-General (DG) or position within the Commission moderate the relationship between politicization and institutional role conceptions? Another avenue for future research is to explore how politicization resonates throughout the other EU institutions, in particular those that are more immediately exposed to public opinion such as the EP and the Council. To conclude: EU politicization and criticism on the Commission do not pass the EU’s civil service unnoticed. It is not only directly felt in the engagement with public opinion, but also indirectly as the Commission’s work is subjected to subsidiarity checks. The environment of the Commission has the potential of influencing the institutional role conceptions of Commission officials. These findings confirm that the Commission operates as an open system, taking public opinion into account, and they challenge the conventional image of the Commission as ‘ivory tower’. Notably however, Commission officials absorb the entire EU environment, not just, or not even primarily, the environment of their home country.

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Notes1 In contrast, see for example the research of Carolyn Ban (2013), Antonis Ellinas and Ezra

Suleiman (2012), Semin Suvarierol (2011), and Jarle Trondal (2007). These authors contend that nationality is not an important predictor for Commission officials’ attitudes or behaviour.

2 Jonas Tallberg et al. (2013, pp. 29-46) describe similar arguments to explain the institutional design of international organizations with, on the one hand, the logic of functional demand and, on the other hand, the logics of strategic legitimation and norm socialization.

3 The concept of ‘institutional role conception’ should not be confused with the concept of ‘role conception’, which involves perceptions of ‘the self ’ or expectations about one’s own role within an organization (Aberbach et al. 1981; March and Olsen 1984; Searing 1994), nor the concept of ‘national role conception’, which denotes policy-makers’ perception of the role and purpose of their own state in the international arena (Aggestam 2006; Holsti 1970).

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Chapter 4

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Chapter IV

Following the Crowd or Developing a Thicker Skin?Assessing the Impact of Euro Scepticism on the

Attitudes of Commission Officials

AbstractThis chapter applies the theory of Representative Bureaucracy to Commission officials’ attitudes. Against the backdrop of the politicization of the EU, I quantitatively assess how the institutional role conceptions of Commission officials are affected by Euro scepticism in their home country. Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions are found to be affected by Euro scepticism, but their response depends on whether the EU is salient in their home country. Somewhat counter intuitively, Commission officials from countries in which the EU is salient adopt a more supranationalist view on the Commission in response to Euro scepticism in their home country, while Commission officials from countries in which the EU is not salient adopt a more state-centric view in response to Euro scepticism in their home country. This study suggests that Commission officials’ attitudes are partly shaped by domestic public opinion.

Keywords: European Commission; Commission officials’ attitudes; Politicization; Euro scepticism; Representative Bureaucracy

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IntroductionEver since the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the European Commission has come to operate in a radically different political and public environment (Bickerton et al. 2015; Kassim et al. 2013; Wonka 2015, pp. 91-93). The Post-Maastricht era is marked by the increased politicization of the European Union (EU), leaving European policy-making no longer insulated from mass publics and domestic politics. The politicized climate involves more political suspicion of supranationalism as well as the rise of Euro scepticism within the member states. The expectation that the ‘elite has had to make room for a more Euro sceptical public’ (Hooghe and Marks 2008, p. 9), resonates in the literature on politicization (Kriesi 2008; Schmitter 2008). While several studies have assessed the impact of public opinion on politicians and the policy output in the EU (Alexandrova et al. 2016; Bølstad 2015; Carrubba 2001; Spoon and Klüver 2014; Steenbergen et al. 2007; Toshkov 2011; Williams and Spoon 2015; Williams 2016), less research has been done on how Commission officials, i.e. the civil servants of the EU, are affected by public opinion (but see Ellinas and Suleiman 2012; Rauh 2016). As civil servants have considerable latitude in determining the direction of public policies (Meier 1993a; Rourke 1992), it is important to study how responsive Commission officials are to their increasingly Euro critical environment. Drawing on the theory of Representative Bureaucracy (Kingsley 1944; Mosher 1968; Subramanian 1967), I hypothesize that Euro scepticism resonates in the attitudes of Commission officials. This chapter therefore asks: how does Euro scepticism affect the views Commission officials have of their institution’s role in EU policy-making, i.e. ‘their institutional role conception’? (Juncos and Pomorska 2010; Hooghe 2012). Representative Bureaucracy contends that a bureaucracy staffed by officials that are representative of the different groups in society is responsive to the wishes and demands of its constituency (Krislov 1974; Long 1952; Meier 1993a; Saltztstein 1985, 1992; Selden 1997). The theory is premised on the belief that personal attributes, such as class, gender or ethnicity, lead to particular early socialization experiences that enable bureaucrats to identify with the interests of specific parts of the political community they serve (Kranz 1976; Krislov 1974; Saltzstein 1979). These experiences give rise to a set of shared values, beliefs, and attitudes that help shape the behaviour of individual bureaucrats. Even if bureaucrats no longer share the same attitudes of their societal group, they understand them, leading them to articulate the interests of their group as policy inputs and so take them into account (Herbert 1974, p. 519; Lim 2006, p. 196). While the link between demographic background and attitudes may be weakened, or even overcome, by

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organizational socialization (Meier and Nigro 1976; Mosher 1968), I take from Representative Bureaucracy that bureaucrats are particularly sensitive to the wishes and demands of their own social group. When applying Representative Bureaucracy to the distinctively multinational constellation of the European Commission, nationality is a particularly salient personal attribute. The pre-socialization logic underpinning Representative Bureaucracy chimes well with studies that highlight the importance of nationality in explaining EU officials’ attitudes (Beyers 2005; Cini 1996; Hooghe 2005, 2012). If national background remains an important reference point for shaping attitudes, Commission officials can be expected to respond to the (Euro sceptic) signals of their compatriots by adjusting their attitudes towards the role of their organization in EU policy-making in a more state-centric direction. I argue however that Commission officials’ attitudes are affected only by Euro scepticism in their home country when, at the same time, the EU is also salient there. Research shows that bureaucrats are responsive to salient issues as they serve as an important referent to judge current or expected demands from the domestic political arena (Joly 2014; Potter and Van Belle 2009; Van Belle 2003). A salient EU debate may trigger the attention of Commission officials, and, following the logic of Representative Bureaucracy, in turn lead them to reconsider their institutional role conception in response to the Euro scepticism in their home country. This renders ‘EU salience’ a moderating variable for the relationship between Euro scepticism and Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. I asses this relationship with the use of three datasets. First, Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions are measured in the ‘European Commission in Question’ (EUCIQ) dataset (Kassim et al. 2013), which captures a wide range of attitudes among a sample of Commission officials in 2008 (N = 1.649). Second, Euro scepticism is measured with the use of the 2008 wave of Eurobarometer data, whereas, third, EU salience is operationalized by means of the salience of the EU among national political parties as assessed in the 2006 Chapel Hill Expert (CHES) expert survey (Hooghe et al. 2010). Somewhat counter intuitively, the analysis shows that when the EU is salient in their home country, Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions become more supranationalist, whereas when the EU is not salient in their home country, Commission officials’ adjust their institutional role conceptions in a more state-centric direction. The remainder of this chapter is structured in four parts. The first part theorizes the relationship between Commission officials’ attitudes and public opinion. This is followed by an overview of the research design and the data sources. The third

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part of the chapter presents the results, after which the fourth part concludes and discusses the further implications of the findings.

The Commission as Representative Bureaucracy: Reflecting National Sentiments?The theory of representative bureaucracy J. Donald Kingsley first coined the term ‘Representative Bureaucracy’ in 1944. Although formulated for national bureaucracies, the theory of Representative Bureaucracy can help us understand how the Commission may represent public opinion across the member states through the attitudes of its staff. Representative Bureaucracy started out by questioning the influential role of bureaucracies in policy-making. Politicians rely on the bureaucracy to advise them about complex and technical issues, and by suggesting preferred policy options, bureaucrats can affect policy-making (Meier 1975; Kingsley 1944). However, bureaucrats cannot be ‘thrown out’ by elections. Therefore, to keep administrators responsive to the people, some controls must be established. Representative Bureaucracy argues that ‘(...) a bureaucracy recruited from all segments of society will produce policies that are democratic in the sense that they are generally responsive to the desires of the public’ (Meier 1993b, p. 2). Whereas Representative Bureaucracy focused initially on representativeness in terms of social class, later research has extended the theory to include other personal attributes such as ethnicity (Hindera 1993; Kranz 1976; Meier 1993a; Theobald and Haider-Merkel 2009), gender (Dolan 2000; Keiser et al. 2002; Newman 1996), educational background (Meier 1993b), and the values of administrators (Krislov 1974; Meier and O’Toole 2006 ). In 1968, Frederik Mosher added a crucial distinction to the theory of Representative Bureaucracy. Whereas Kingsley described a direct relationship between the sociological profile of civil servants and their behaviour, Mosher denounced this automaticity and distinguished ‘passive’ and ‘active representation’. Passive representativeness means that the social composition of a bureaucracy reflects the social composition of the population that it administers. As such, passive representativeness has a symbolic function: it indicates that all segments of society have equal access to, and can participate in the civil service (Mosher 1982, pp. 14-15). In contrast, active representation means that civil servants are ‘expected to press for the interests and desires of those whom they are presumed to represent’ (Mosher ibid.). Mosher expects that administrators do not necessarily promote the interests of the group they passively reflect, as organizational factors can either

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enhance or inhibit the transformation from passive to active representation (cf. also Meier and Stewart 1992; Hindera 1993). The proposition that, if a bureaucracy is expected to produce policies that are responsive to the public, it needs to reflects its citizens sociologically, becomes particularly challenging when we look at the multinational constituency of the Commission. The Commission is made up of individuals of 28 member states each with their own politico-economic system, own identity, and own degree of Euro scepticism. We are aware of five studies that have applied Representative Bureaucracy to the Commission. In two articles, Magali Gravier (2008, 2013) investigates how the Commission’s ambition of geographical balance translates into its staffing policies, and shows that concerns about geographical balance have grown over time. Anne Stevens (2009) finds that in terms of gender, the Commission is not representative of its population. Zuzana Murdoch, Jarle Trondal, and Benny Geys (2015) find a lack of passive representation among Seconded National Experts (SNEs), in terms of gender, education, age and geographic origin, but do find the potential for active representation in terms of SNE’s home country’s policy preferences. SNEs are more likely to take on ‘national role perceptions’, i.e. see themselves as representatives of their national government, when the public in their home country is more opposed to supranational policy-making. Murdoch and colleagues (2015, p. 8) conceptualize this adjustment of role perceptions as the ‘potential for active representation’. Due to the relationship between role perceptions and behaviour, role perceptions are therefore ‘a primary determinant of active representation’ (Bradbury and Kellough 2008, p. 711). In yet another study, Jarle Trondal, Zuzana Murdoch, and Benny Geys (2015) confirm these findings, but show that, while there is an active representation potential in terms of policy preferences, the role perceptions of experts are best explained by in-house re-socialization. The longer SNEs are in the Commission, the more they see themselves as independent experts rather than as representatives of their home country government. Even though support for the Commission as a representative bureaucracy is mixed, we can draw some preliminary conclusions. The Commission does not passively represent its constituency in terms of demographics (e.g. age, gender, education; Stevens 2009; Murdoch et al. 2015; cf. also Page 1995; Suleiman 1984). However, there is evidence that the Commission aims at achieving passive representation (Gravier 2008, 2013), which enables the potential for active representation by nationality (Trondal et al. 2015).

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The nationality issue in the CommissionSince the seminal study on the European Commission by David Coombes (1970), who described the Commission as a collection of ‘feudal fiefdoms’, the role of nationality and culture within the Commission has been a popular research theme among social scientists (e.g. Abélès and Bellier 1996; Ban 2013; Cini 1996; Dimitrakopoulos and Kassim 2005; Egeberg 1999; Georgakakis and Weisbein 2010; Hooghe 2012; Shore 2000; Trondal 2007). There is a well-established debate on attitude formation in the Commission which roughly can be divided into two camps. First, in opposition to the logic of Representative Bureaucracy, organization scholars theorize that Commission officials’ beliefs and attitudes are predominantly shaped in the organizational context in which they operate (Egeberg 1999; Henökl 2014; Trondal 2007). Organization theory is underpinned by ideas of ‘bounded rationality’ (Simon 1965) and ‘the logic of appropriateness’ (March and Olsen 1998). As officials are not able to take fully informed decisions, they rely on heuristics provided by the rules or norms of an organization. Organizational mechanisms select what passes through the bureaucrats’ ‘bottleneck of attention’ (Egeberg 1999; Simon 1985) and socialize bureaucrats into having supranationalist attitudes which are compatible with the objectives of the organization. Second, in support of the logic of Representative Bureaucracy, a group of scholars pinpoint a continuous influence of national background on the attitudes of EU officials (Beyers 2005; Cini 1996; Hooghe 2012). They argue that while socialization within (EU) institutions is a powerful predictor of an official’s attitude, it is seldom able to neutralize previous socialization experiences in his or her home country (Hooghe 2005; Kassim et al. 2013). These results are anchored in psychological theories, such as the ‘primacy effect’ (Sears and Levy 2003) or the ‘effect of novelty’ (Sears and Funk 1999), which underline the strength of attitudes which are internalized in one’s young adulthood, in this case the national contexts in which EU officials matured. Thus, on average, officials’ attitudes vary along national lines (Hooghe 2005, 2012). Both sides have limitations. On the one hand, organization scholars do not seem to account for the changing (supranationalist) structure of the Commission in the Post-Maastricht era. Anchrit Wille (2013) describes how the Commission has experienced a process of ‘normalization’, in which it changes from an international organization to an organization that shares many of the organizational features of national bureaucracies. The Commission increasingly opens up to concerns of EU citizens and underlines the importance of subsidiarity in its policy-making

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(Bes 2016; Cini 2008; Peterson 1995). For example, with the adoption of the Transparency Initiative in 2007, the Commission has made its policy-making more transparent (Cini 2008), the Commission’s 2013 Regulatory Fitness and Performance Programme (REFIT) reviews EU policy-making with the aim of cutting red tape, and the appointment of the current Commission presidency has been made more political by linking it to the results of the European Parliament (EP) elections, in which each party group in the EP nominated its own Spitzenkandidat (Christiansen 2016; Hobolt 2014). Such new organizational structures may stimulate Commission officials to be more attentive to a Euro sceptical public, prompting less supranationalist attitudes. On the other hand, studies that highlight the impact of national background on Commission officials’ attitudes have thus far only done so by using predominantly static factors, i.e. the degree of federalism, population size, or a country’s dominant religion (Hooghe 2005, 2012). Yet, at the same time Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions are found to have become more heterogeneous and nuanced over time (Bes 2013). To transcend this paradox, I therefore propose to examine the following ‘fluid’ national background factor: the politicization of the EU in the home countries of Commission officials, in which public opinion is a key ingredient. In sum, this chapter expects that, guided by new organizational structures, Commission officials have become more attentive to public opinion in the post-Maastricht era. Following the Representative Bureaucracy logic, it is expected that especially the Euro scepticism in Commission officials’ home countries has the potential to affect Commission officials’ attitudes. However, I argue that this relationship is triggered only when the EU is salient in one’s home country.

Issue Salience and Responsive Policy-Making: Towards HypothesesIn his review article, Paul Burstein (2003) concludes that most scholars who investigate the impact of public opinion on public policy in democratic countries tend to agree that public opinion influences public policy (but see Manza and Cook 2002), and that the more salient an issue is to the public, the stronger this relationship is (Page and Shapiro 1983; Risse-Kappen 1991; Stimson 1991; Stimson et al. 1995; Wlezien 1995). Often, this congruence is explained by a principal-agent logic that explains that politicians are responsive to the public in order to safeguard their position.

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Studies on the US administration point to the role of bureaucrats in the public opinion-policy nexus as well (Cohen 1973; Powlick 1991). For example, Philip Powlick (1991) argues that the Vietnam war brought about a change in the attitudes of foreign policy officials towards the public, in which they evaluated the public’s sophistication more favourably. Powlick also shows that officials who work in the least salient policy areas tend to see or assume greater public ignorance than others, and thus tend to discount the public’s sophistication, whereas officials in salient policy areas take public opinion more seriously. Studies on European bureaucracies confirm the influence of public opinion on policy (Soroka and Wlezien 2005), but also suggest the explanatory value of issue salience (Bækgaard et al. 2015). More recent research explains the impact of public opinion on policy-making by issue salience in media coverage, and extends the principal-agent logic between politicians and their electorate to the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats (Joly 2014; Potter and Van Belle 2009; Rioux and Van Belle 2005; Van Belle 2003). To avoid sanctions by the elected politicians, such as cutting back or cancelling certain projects, bureaucrats try to meet the demands of the public. This principal-agent logic may not be applicable to the Commission as the College of Commissioners is not elected. However, as Douglas van Belle (2003, p. 266) notes, salient issues provide a ‘referent’ that bureaucrats use to judge current or expected demands from the domestic political arena. Salient issues are attention-grabbing and hence may provoke a response of bureaucrats. In the Post-Maastricht era, issues of European integration have become particularly salient. European integration has become ‘politicized’, engaging mass publics and domestic politics in supranational policy-making (Hooghe and Marks 2008). Politicization has come along with the rise of Euro scepticism in the member states. Opposition to the EU has become increasingly embedded at the European and national level (Usherwood and Startin 2013). On the basis of the theory of Representative Bureaucracy, combined with the empirical evidence that national background helps shape Commission officials’ attitudes (Bes 2013; Hooghe 2005, 2012; Kassim et al. 2013), and the studies that show that the Commission opens up to politicization (Bes 2016; Rauh 2016), I assume that Commission officials are influenced by the Euro scepticism in their home country. With ‘salience’ as the most important driver of politicization (Hutter et al. 2016, p. 8; cf. also Green-Pedersen 2012, p. 117), I argue that the impact of public Euro scepticism and Commission officials’ attitudes is conditional on whether or not the EU is salient. Below, I develop two competing hypotheses about

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the direction of the effect of Euro scepticism on Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. Based on the rationalist assumption that the Commission is a ‘competence-seeking actor’ (Pollack 2003), Christian Rauh (in Hartlapp et al. 2014, pp. 229-230) argues that, to increase its output legitimacy, the Commission responds to the politicization of salient issues by producing policies that are consistent with the public interest. Building on the work of Rauh, Bart Bes (2016) investigated how Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions are affected by the politicization of the EU polity in their home countries. In a preliminary exploratory study, Bes (2016) finds that, driven by concerns over subsidiarity and legitimacy, Commission officials tend to mitigate their (supranationalist) views on the role of their institution within EU policy-making. Likewise, Murdoch and colleagues (2015) find that, when the public in their home country turns more Euro sceptic, SNEs feel more like representatives of their home country’s government than of the EU. These studies indicate that, out of legitimacy concerns, Commission officials may respond to Euro scepticism by adjusting their attitudes towards the role of their organization in EU policy-making in a more state-centric direction. This leads to the first hypothesis:

H1: Under the condition that the EU is salient in the home country of a Commission official: the more Euro scepticism in the home country of a Commission official, the more state-centric this Commission official becomes

An alternative hypothesis can be gathered from the work of Antonis Ellinas and Ezra Suleiman (2012). Ellinas and Suleiman investigated how Commission officials respond to a more Euro sceptic environment. They argue that when bureaucracies are not recognized by their environment, they tend to generate ‘legitimacy from within’, and therefore denounce Euro scepticism (ibid., pp. 32-33). This self-legitimation strategy is inherent to bureaucracies that aim to survive and justify their authority. In the case of the Commission, self-legitimation strengthens supranationalist attitudes (Ellinas and Suleiman 2012). Based on this process of self-legitimation, the alternative hypothesis states:

H2: Under the condition that the EU is salient in the home country of a Commission official: the more Euro scepticism in the home country of a Commission official, the more supranationalist this Commission official becomes

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Data and VariablesThis cross-sectional study investigates how Commission officials’ attitudes respond to the Euro scepticism in their home country in the year 2008 (N = 1.649). The year 2008 is an interesting year in terms of Euro scepticism, as the EU was politicized in different degrees across the member states due to the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty (Grande and Hutter 2016). Together with the failure of the 2005 Constitutional Treaty, the Lisbon Treaty is considered to have been a watershed in the integration process and its politicization (Grande and Hutter 2016). Across Europe, the ratification of the Treaty faced a number of obstacles: in Ireland, the first referendum on the Lisbon Treaty was rejected (Quinlan 2009), in the Czech Republic, President Václav Klaus, openly opposed the Treaty (Kratochvil and Braun 2009), and, in Great Britain, the absence of prime minister Gordon Brown from the signature ceremony has been interpreted as him downplaying the importance of the Treaty possibly due to the growing Euro scepticism in the country (Donnelly 2008). The following section outlines the operationalization and data sources of this study and presents descriptive statistics of the variables used in the analysis.

OperationalizationDependent variableThe key dependent variable is Commission officials’ institutional role conception. The institutional role conceptions are measured at the level of the individual Commission official. This refers to the attitude that officials hold towards the role of their institution, ranging from a supranationalist image of the Commission in which it leads the integration process to a state-centric image in which the Commission is subservient to member states’ preferences (Hooghe 2012). Institutional role conceptions indicate the perceived status of the Commission in the EU’s institutional architecture from within the Commission. As Commission officials are an integral part of the Commission, their attitudes are not just ‘external perceptions’, but have the potential to inform individual decision-making behaviour. This dependent variable is measured with two items from the 2008 EUCIQ dataset (Kassim et al. 2013); a supranational item: ‘Some want the College of Commissioners to become the government of the European Union. What do you think?’ and an intergovernmental item: ‘Some argue that member states – not the Commission or the European Parliament – should be the central players in the European Union. What is your position?’ Both items are answered on a 5

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Table 4.1: Description of the dependent variable, i.e. ‘institutional role conceptions’

Hooghe typology Description Cut-off pointsSupranationalists Officials that contend

that the Commission should be the government of the EU (Hooghe 2005, 2012).

Officials who agree strongly (1) or agree (2) with the supranationalist item, and strongly disagree (5) or disagree (4) with the state-centric item.

Leaning supranationalists

Officials that are neutral about state-centricism but supportive of a supranationalist Commission, or officials who are neutral about supranationalism but are opposed to state-centricism (Bes 2013).

· Officials who are neutral (3) on the state-centric item, but strongly agree (1) or agree (2) with the supranationalist item.

· Officials who are neutral (3) on the supranationalist item, but strongly disagree (5) or disagree (4) with the state-centric item.

Institutional pragmatists

Officials that stress the need for a ‘non-hierarchical’ co-operation between the Commission and the member states (Bes 2016, p. 10), 10; cf. also (Hooghe 2005, 2012).

· Officials who are neutral on both items.

· Officials that (strongly) agree with the supranationalist and (strongly) agree with the state-centric item.

· Officials that (strongly) disagree with the supranationalist item and (strongly) disagree with the state-centric item.

Leaning state-centrics

Officials that are neutral about supranationalism but supportive of a state-centric Commission, or officials who are neutral about state-centricism but are opposed to supranationalism (Bes 2013).

· Officials who are neutral (3) on the supranationalist item but strongly agree (1) or agree (2) with the state-centric item.

· Officials who are neutral (3) on the state-centric item, but strongly disagree (5) or disagree (4) with the supranationalist item.

State-centrics These officials hold that member states should be the central players in the EU (Hooghe 2005, 2012) - ‘the foxes in the henhouse’ (Dehousse and Thompson 2012)

Officials who disagree strongly (5) or disagree (4) with the supranationalist item, and strongly agree (1), agree (2) with the state-centric item.

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Figure 4.1: Distribution of Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions

point Likert scale ranging from strongly agree (1) to strongly disagree (5). Different types of institutional role conceptions are constructed on the basis of these two items and ordered on an ordinal scale. While Table 4.1. gives an overview of the descriptions and cut-off points for these types in the 2008 dataset, Figure 4.1. illustrates the distribution of the institutional role conceptions over the sample of Commission officials. Figure 4.1. shows how the supranationalists are the majority in this sample, even though the group of institutional pragmatists is also quite large. Even though the state-centrics and the leaning state-centrics are clearly the minority groups in the Commission, together they are more than 10 percent of the Commission officials in this sample. All in all, there is a diversity of institutional role conceptions in the Commission.

Independent variables and interactionThe key independent variables are measured at the level of the member state (N = 24, Luxembourg, Malta, and Cyprus are excluded from the analysis due to a low number of respondents from these countries). The main independent variable

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in this analysis is the degree of Euro scepticism per member state in 2008. Euro scepticism is measured by the following item from the spring 2008 Eurobarometer survey; ‘Generally speaking, do you think that (your country’s) membership of the European Community (Common Market) is..?’, with answer categories, ‘a good thing’, ‘a bad thing’, ‘neither good nor bad’, ‘DK don’t know’. The percentages for the answer category ‘a bad thing’ have been included in the dataset, and have been centralized around the Mean. This means that the value of 0 represents the Mean level of Euro scepticism. Each official from a particular member state thus has the same Euro scepticism score. Rather than using (media) data that directly capture the salience of the EU in domestic debates, issue salience is measured by the extent that the political parties of a particular member state make the EU a salient issue. This choice is motivated by two reasons. First, there are no readymade media data that capture salience of the EU in the year 2008 for all the 24 member states that are included in the analysis. Second, there are a number of studies that show that public opinion shapes the agenda and preferences of political parties (Adams et al. 2004; Soroka and Wlezien 2005; Stimson et al. 1995) or that there is at least a reciprocal relation between public opinion and party positioning (Steenbergen et al. 2007). The causal argument in this literature is that public opinion controls political parties through the threat of electoral retribution or victory (Williams 2016, p. 4). I therefore assume a high correlation between the salience of the EU in public debates and salience of the EU amongst national parties. Concretely, salience of the EU is measured by the ‘EU_SALIENCE’ item from the 2006 wave of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) dataset (Hooghe et al. 2010). The CHES dataset is composed of expert judgments of the profile of political parties. In this case, I use the values indicating how important the EU is for each political party within a particular member state. The average issue saliency was calculated per member state and weighted by VOTE. VOTE indicates the vote percentage received by a party in the national election year most prior to 2006. By controlling for VOTE, the issue salience score takes into account the political strength of parties, and so, for example, controls for minor parties with a strong focus on the EU. Like Euro scepticism, issue salience has been centralized around the Mean. Each official from a particular member states receives the same issue salience score. Finally, the two way interaction effect - Euro scepticism x issue salience - is made by a multiplication of the Euro scepticism and the issue salience variables. Again, each official from a particular member state receives the same interaction value. The multiplication ensures that the magnitude of the effect of Euro scepticism on

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Commission officials’ institutional role conception, varies as a function of issue salience (Brambor et al. 2006). To visualize the interaction, a predictive margin and marginal effects plot was generated (Berry et al. 2012) with the use of the Stata package ‘Marhis’ (Hernández 2016). See the appendix for more descriptive statistics of the independent variables.

ControlsFollowing previous studies, several control variables that have been found to have an effect on Commission officials’ attitudes (Kassim et al. 2013) are included in the analysis. At the individual level, the analysis controls for one’s ‘length of service’, whether one ‘works in cabinet’, has experience in his or her ‘national administration’, and one’s ‘ideology’, assessed on both a Left-Right scale and GAL-TAN scale (Hooghe et al. 2002). At the country level, the analysis controls for the size of one’s home country, the degree of federalism of one’s home country, and the effectiveness of the government in one’s home country. Table 4.2. shows the descriptive statistics of the variables used in the analysis.

Table 4.2: Descriptive statistics

Minimum Maximum Mean Std. DeviationInstitutional role conceptions

1 5 3.69 1.23

Euro scepticism -7.96 18.04 0 7.25

Issue salience -.49 .77 0 .28

Years in the Commission 1 45 12.67 9.08

Works in cabinet 0 1 .03 .17

National administration 0 18 2.69 4.60

Ideology: Left-Right 0 10 5.46 2.00

Ideology: GAL – TAN 0 10 3.65 2.48

Country size 1342 82368 36525.02 27401.08

Federalism 0 29.4 15.42 8.97

Government effectiveness -.07 2.07 1.14 .47

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Commission Officials’ Attitudinal Response to Euro ScepticismExploring variation in Commission officials’ institutional role conceptionsAs a first indication, Figure 4.2. shows a tree cluster analysis (CHAID growing method) whereby national groups of officials are arrayed on a five-point attitudinal scale from state-centric to supranational (Bes 2013; Hooghe 2005, 2012). The CHAID growing method is based on an algorithm that explores data in three steps; merging, splitting, and stopping. A tree is subsequently grown by repeatedly using these three steps on each node (groups of cases that share similar values) starting from the root node (all cases). The CHAID algorithm accepts only ordinal or nominal (e.g. nationality) predictors.

The cluster graph shows that each of the role types are represented in the sample. The most state-centric officials come from the Anglo Saxon countries (Ireland

Note: Figure 4.2 is based on author’s calculations. The EUCIQ dataset included very few officials from the member states which are presented in italics.

Figure 4.2: Cluster analysis of institutional role conception per nationality

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and the United Kingdom), Scandinavia (Denmark and Sweden), two of the Baltic states (Estonia and Latvia) and two Eastern and Central European states (Slovakia and Romania). The most supranationalist officials come from three Southern European states (Greece, Italy, and Spain), two Eastern European states (Bulgaria and Hungary), and the country in which most of the EU institutions are located: Belgium. Consistent with earlier studies, we can observe a division between the Northern, protestant, European countries, which are more state-centric, and the Southern, catholic, European countries, which are more supranationalist (Boomgaarden and Freire 2009; Minkenberg 2009; Nelsen et al. 2001). The first step of the explanatory analysis is to calculate the correlation between Euro scepticism and Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions at the aggregate level. Euro scepticism has a negative association with Commission officials’ attitudes, r = -.36, p<.001. The higher the level of Euro scepticism in a particular member state, the more state-centric the Commission officials from that country are. A partial correlation between Euro scepticism and Commission officials’ attitudes controlled for issue salience confirms the negative association, r = -.31, p<.001. Looking at Figure 4.3., we can examine our hypotheses more closely. This figure visualizes the relationship between Euro scepticism and Commission officials’ attitudes at the level of the member state moderated by issue salience. ‘Low salience’ refers to all country values below the unstandardized salience Mean <2.85, whereas ‘high salience’ refers to all country values equalling, or higher than, the unstandardized salience Mean ≥ 2.85. Figure 4.3. provides some evidence for H2: Commission officials from countries in which the EU is salient, adopt, or strengthen their supranationalist institutional role conceptions as a response to Euro scepticism. A couple of countries warrant closer attention here. First, three countries in the left lower corner are not in line with the H1 nor H2: Slovakia (SK), Ireland (IE), and Estonia (EE). In these countries, the degree of Euro scepticism is low and the EU is not salient, yet the officials from these three countries belong to the most state-centric ones. For Ireland, in particular, which saw a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty being rejected in 2008, this result is puzzling. Possibly, officials from these countries share similar values on individual level indicators which may explain their outlier positions in Figure 4.3. Finally, in line with H2, Commission officials from countries in which the EU is salient are found to adopt more supranationalist institutional role conceptions in response to Euro scepticism. The following steps in the analysis aim to investigate this relationship further.

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The next step is to assess whether the relationship between Euro scepticism and Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions, as moderated by issue salience, found at the aggregate level stands up at the individual level. A negative correlation is found between individual Commission official attitudes’ and the level of Euro scepticism in their home country, r -.12, p<.001. When this relationship is controlled for issue salience, the (partial) correlation remains negative, r = -.10, p<.001. This means that the higher the degree of Euro scepticism in a particular member state, the more likely that the Commission officials from this member state adopt a state-centric institutional role conception. As such, Commission officials’ attitudes reflect the sentiments in their home countries. To explore the relationship between Euro scepticism and Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions more systematically, a multivariate analysis is performed in three models. Model 1 examines the relationship between Euro scepticism and individual role conceptions, and Models 2 and 3 examine the association with controls. The first model includes the three main variables related to the expectations of the chapter; Euro scepticism, issue salience, and the interaction. Euro scepticism does not appear to have an impact on

Figure 4.3: Relationship between Euro scepticism and Commission officials’ attitudes at the aggregate level

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Commission officials’ attitudes (Beta = -.01, ns); even though previous analysis shows a relationship at the aggregate level, individual-level analysis indicates that Commission officials’ attitudes do not reflect the degree of Euro scepticism in their home country when issue salience is zero. Hence, there is no main effect between Euro scepticism and Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions.

Table 4.3: Multivariate analysis: the impact of Euro scepticism and issue salience on Commission officials’ attitudes

Model I Model II Model IIEuro scepticism and issue salience

Euro scepticism -.01(.00)ns. -.01(.00)** .00(.00)ns

Issue salience 71(.12)*** .70(.00)*** .72(.14)***

Euro scepticism x issue salience

.09(.03)*** .08(.02)*** .04(.02)**

Controls

Individual level

Length of service .01(.00)** .00(.00)ns

Works in cabinet .01(.17) ns -.01(.17)ns

National administration -.03(.01)*** -.02(.01)***

Ideology: Left-Right -.04(.01)*** -.03(.01)**

Ideology: GAL-TAN -.02 (.01)* -.02(.01)**

Country level

Country size -4.95e-06(1.36e-06)***

Federalism .03(.00)***

Government effectiveness -.25(.08)***

Constant 3.73 4.02 3.93

R2 .04 .07 .10

Adj. R2 .04 .06 .09

N 1.649 1.614 1.614

***p<.01; **p<.05; *p<.10

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Salience, however, has a positive and significant main effect on Commission officials’ attitudes when Euro scepticism is zero (Beta = .71, p<.01). This means that the more salient the EU is within one’s home country, the more supranationalist a Commission official from that country is, at least when Euro scepticism is close to zero. The interaction confirms that the effect of Euro scepticism is conditional on the effect of salience, so that the more salient the EU is in a country, the more likely it pushes Commission officials towards supranationalism and, conversely, when the EU is less salient (i.e. salience has a value below zero), the more likely it pushes Commission officials towards state-centrism (Beta = .09, p<.01). This relationship is partly robust under controls. In the second model, which includes individual controls, Euro scepticism has a significant negative impact on Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions (Beta = -.01, p<.05). In other words, the more Euro scepticism in the home country of a Commission official, the more this official is induced to adopt a state-centric institutional role conception. However, Euro scepticism has a positive impact on Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions when the EU is salient. This means that when Euro scepticism is combined with high salience, Commission officials tend to adopt a more supranationalist institutional role conception (-.01 + .08), and when Euro scepticism is combined with low salience, Commission officials tend to adopt a more state-centric institutional role conception (-.01 - .08). Further, several of the other control variables are significant: 1) officials who have worked for a longer period for the Commission are more supranationalist (Beta = .01, p<.05), 2) officials who previously worked in the national administration tend to have a more state-centric attitude (Beta = -.03, p<.01), and 3) right-leaning and TAN-leaning officials tend to be more state-centric (Beta = -.04, p<.05) (Beta = -.02, p<.10). The third model adds a set of country-level controls. Concordant with the national pre-socialization thesis (Hooghe 2005, 2012), all of these country-specific variables seem to contribute to explaining Commission officials’ attitudes. No news here: officials from smaller, more federalist countries, with a weak government, tend to have more supranationalist viewpoints on the Commission (Hooghe 2001, 2005, 2012). More important, however, is that when controlling for the theoretically relevant individual and country level indicators, the direct effect of Euro scepticism disappears (Beta = .00, ns). The relationships that do hold however are the positive effect of salience on Commission officials’ attitudes (Beta = .72, p<.01), and the effect of Euroscepticism on Commission officials’ attitudes depending on whether the EU is salient or not (Beta = .04, p<.05).

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Figure 4.4. shows the marginal effects of the interaction on Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions, superimposed on the distribution of Salience. We can see that the higher the level of salience, the more positive the effect of Euro scepticism on Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. As the 95% confidence intervals indicate, the positive effect of Euro scepticism, combined with high levels of salience, on Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions, is significantly different from the effect of Euro scepticism at zero (i.e. the Mean level of Euro scepticism). However, we must be cautious. The density of the highest levels of Salience (from .5 and higher) are rather low and a number of salience values do not have any observations. This means that the estimation of the interaction effect may not be entirely accurate. Still, Figure 4.4. shows a positive trend of the interaction effect.

Figure 4.4: Marginal effects plot for the interaction of Euro scepticism and salience on Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions

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Conclusion Against the backdrop of politicization, this chapter investigates how Commission officials are affected by Euro scepticism in their home country. The theoretical impetus for this study is the theory of Representative Bureaucracy (Kingsley 1944; Meier 1993a). This theory describes how a representative bureaucracy contributes to the legitimacy of a political system. It also explains how the sociological makeup of a bureaucracy matters for responsive policy-making (Gravier 2013). Through nationality, Commission officials may passively represent the Euro scepticism in their home counties which, in turn, enables the potential for active representation by nationality (Murdoch et al. 2015). In contrast to the studies of Murdoch et al. (2015) and Trondal et al. (2015), the results of this chapter show that Commission officials do not echo Euro scepticism. Indeed, when the EU is less salient in their home country, Commission officials follow the Euro sceptic crowd in their home country. However, when the EU is salient in their home country, Commission officials tend to adopt a more supranationalist institutional role conception that differentiates them from the Euro scepticism in their home countries. A salient ‘constraining dissensus’ thus leads Commission officials to grow a thicker skin. The Representative Bureaucracy logic, which theorizes that representation is chiefly receptive, therefore does not seems to be applicable to the European Commission. The effect of public opinion on Commission officials’ attitudes thus appears quite opposite to the effect it has on national politicians. Driven by electoral concerns, politicians follow public preferences (Page and Shapiro 1983; Stimson 1991; Wlezien 1995). In times of high Euro scepticism, national politicians may therefore blame the Commission for policies that are domestically unpopular, challenging the legitimacy of the Commission. In contrast, Commission officials are pushed to legitimate themselves ‘from within’ when they are faced with an adverse environment (Ellinas and Suleiman 2012, pp. 32-33). When they do not receive the support of their political overseers, bureaucrats tend to justify their authority and existence themselves. In the context of the Commission, this self-legitimation strategy involves advancing specific narratives about how the Commission represents the ‘future Europeans’. Intrinsic to this narrative is the desire for more European integration. Hence, the self-legitimation predisposes Commission officials to become more supranationalist as a defence mechanism against their adverse environment. May we then expect an increasingly supranationalist Commission in the Post-Maastricht era of an increasingly politicized EU polity? This would challenge

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the core assumptions of the Representative Bureaucracy literature, and it may also suggest that organizational socialization could neutralize pre-socialization experiences (Egeberg 1999; Trondal 2007) The analysis in this chapter focused on country-specific effects. Future research could explore how Euro scepticism affects Commission officials at the individual level through, for example, their media consumption or by the number of protests in their home country. Another avenue could involve an exploration of the impact of the saliency of the policy areas in which Commission officials operate, are Commission officials more sensitive to debates related to their portfolio? To conclude, in keeping with the Representative Bureaucracy logic, I find that, Commission officials’ attitudes are shaped by developments outside of the Commission, but that the direction of these effects run counter to the theory. An important part of the Commission’s external environment is the Euro scepticism and salience of EU debates in the home countries of Commission officials, and my results suggest that, push comes to shove, Commission officials respond in a contrarian way to the signals they receive from their home environment.

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Notes1 When using the ‘salience’ measure for the 2007 Lisbon Treaty of the politicization index

of Hutter and Grande (2014), the positive relationship between salience and Commission officials’ attitudes remains intact. Besides salience, Hutter and Grande’s index also includes ‘actor expansion’ and ‘polarization’. Salience appears the strongest predictor of Commission officials’ attitudes.

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Chapter 5

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Chapter V

The Constraining Dissensus and the European CommissionA Comparative Case Study of the Negotiations of the

EU-Japan Free Trade Agreement and TTIP

AbstractHow does the politicization of European integration affects the positions that Commission officials adopt in the negotiations of international trade agreements? To investigate this, I compare the processes of two ongoing trade negotiations: the politicized Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the depoliticized negotiations of the EU-Japan free trade agreement. I hypothesize that when international trade agreements are politicized, negotiations 1) are more tightly controlled by member states, and 2) are made more transparent. These mechanisms are expected to constrain Commission officials in the sense that their default preferences for free trade are adjusted to accommodate public concerns. This chapter shows that the constraining dissensus is detectable primarily in the Commission’s willingness to make its mode of operation more transparent – not in tighter control by member states on the negotiation process. All in all, I detect little evidence that the Commission has had to adjust its initial positions substantially. The upshot is that the impact of the constraining dissensus on international trade has, so far, been limited.

Keywords: EU-Japan FTA; European Union; trade negotiations; politicization; postfunctionalism; TTIP

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IntroductionThe European Union (EU) has become increasingly politicized since the early 1990s (Hooghe and Marks 2008; Hutter et al. 2016). Following a surge of anti-globalization protests in Europe and the United States (US), most notably the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’, the EU’s external trade policy is one area that has particularly become more visible and contested among the European citizens (Gheyle 2016; Meunier 2003). Critics of the EU’s trade agreements oppose the trade liberalizing objectives of these deals as well as the secretive process in which they are negotiated (Dür and Mateo 2014; Morin et al. 2015). At the same time, as part of the Common Commercial Policy, the EU’s external trade policy is among the most prominent policies that has been placed under its exclusive competence. The EU negotiates trade agreements with third countries with the aim of ‘the progressive abolition of restrictions on international trade’ (ex. TFEU art. 2016). The combination of the politicization of international trade and the delegation of trade-making authority to the EU make for a ‘potentially explosive mix’ (Meunier 2003, pp. 69-70). As the EU’s main negotiator, politicization often comes along with challenges to the legitimacy of the European Commission (ibid. p. 82). To assess how politicization constrains the positions adopted by Commission officials in international trade negotiations, I trace and compare the processes of two ongoing trade negotiations: the publically scrutinized Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the publically ‘overlooked’ EU-Japan Free Trade Agreement (FTA). To explain the role of politicization in the negotiation of trade agreements, I draw upon the postfunctionalist theory as developed by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks (2008). Hooghe and Marks expect politicization to have a ‘downward pressure’ on European integration as national governments need to take the, increasingly Euro critical, public opinion into account. This situation is described as a ‘constraining dissensus’ (Hooghe and Marks 2008, p. 5). However, national governments may be able to shield EU policies from the effects of politicization by delegating authority to non-majoritarian technocratic supranational institutions (Schimmelfennig 2014, p. 334; Mair 2007). Indeed, as the member states have delegated trade authority to the EU, the area of trade policy may be a hard target for politicization. This is consistent with the ‘collusive delegation’ argument which posits that member states have deliberately delegated trade authority to the EU in the Rome Treaty (1957) to shield the policy-process from protectionist trade interests (Nicolaïdis and Meunier 2002, p. 175; Woolcock 2005, p. 247), ‘and as a result, promote trade liberalization’ (Meunier 2005, p. 8; cf. also Siles-Brügge 2013). How effective is the shielding mechanism in the EU’s ‘new trade politics’ in which trade agreements,

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besides the traditional obstacles to trade (e.g. tariffs, limits to public procurement), also pay attention to ‘behind-the-border’ trade obstacles (e.g. labour, environment, or food safety standards), which affect the lives of the citizens of the EU more directly (Young and Peterson 2006)? In this study, I hypothesize how politicization can break the ‘supranational shield’ and push Commission officials to be responsive to immediate widespread public interests instead of furthering their trade liberalizing agenda. I theorize and examine two ‘constraining dissensus mechanisms’. In line with the tenets of postfunctionalism, the first mechanism runs through the member states. Drawing on Principal-Agent theory (PA), I argue that when international trade negotiations are politicized, member states will exert stronger control over the negotiations (Damro 2007; Delreux 2009, 2011). Stronger control from the member states in turn reduces the discretion of Commission officials in international trade negotiations, which makes them more responsive to public interests as articulated by the member states. Complementary to the postfunctionalist focus on national policy-makers, the second mechanism describes how politicization affects EU policy-makers directly. I rely here on a norm-guided open system approach that theorizes how organizations depend on their environment for support and legitimacy (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977). I argue that when trade negotiations are politicized, the Commission is pressured to increase the transparency of the negotiations so as to safeguard its legitimacy, which, in turn, increases Commission officials’ exposure to public interests (Bes 2016). This chapter shows that the constraining dissensus primarily works through internal reform of the Commission and hardly through the member states. The TTIP negations are much more transparent than the EU-Japan FTA negotiations. Yet the impact of the constraining dissensus in the area of international trade seems limited. Except for the Commission’s step away from private arbitration, as marked by the notable change from the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) to the Investment Court System (ICS) in the TTIP, the Commission has adjusted its initial positions only to a small degree. This chapter proceeds as follows. First, I describe postfunctionalism with its crucial concept of politicization. Second, I theorize the two mechanisms that constrain Commission officials’ behaviour in politicized international trade negotiations. Third, the research design is presented, which, fourth, is followed by an in-depth analysis in which the course of the TTIP and EU-Japan trade negotiations are traced and compared. The chapter ends with a discussion of the implications of this research.

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Theorizing the ‘Constraining Dissensus’A postfunctionalist lens Hooghe and Marks’ (2008) theory of postfunctionalism provides the theoretical lens for this study. Postfunctionalism builds upon two earlier theories of regional integration: functionalism (Mitrany 1943) and neofunctionalism (Haas 1958; Lindberg 1963; Schmitter 1969). David Mitrany (1943) developed the ‘functional approach’ to organizing peace in the post war world. Deviating from the traditional conception of states having the exclusive political authority over each policy issue, Mitrany (1943, p. 236) argued that political authority should be organized at those levels of governance where each policy issue can be organized most efficiently and effectively, i.e. ‘form follows function’. Mitrany envisaged a set of international organizations, managed by technocratic elites, each in charge of a specific area of functional cooperation. Functional cooperation was assumed to diminish the potential for conflict between states, leading to their peaceful coexistence. Neofunctionalism (Haas 1958; Lindberg 1963) refined functionalism from a normative approach to an actual analytical framework. In his seminal study The Uniting of Europe, Ernst Haas (1958, p. 292) introduced the concept of ‘spillover’ to explain regional integration. Spillover means that when states integrate one particular sector, they will feel pressured to integrate other, functionally related, sectors; for integration in one sector to be fully efficient, integration in a next sector is needed (Haas 1958, p. 298). This spillover logic suggests that when the first steps towards integration have been set, the process will become ‘self-sustaining’. Eventually, neofunctionalists expected that continued regional integration would lead to the ‘politicization of European integration’1; a process in which European decision-making becomes more visible and contested among mass publics and domestic politics (Schmitter 1969, p. 166). Following the logic of state building, where pressures for public goods lead to centralization, neofunctionalists expect that politicization will lead to further European polity building (Hooghe and Marks 2008, p. 6). Like neo-functionalism, postfunctionalism theorizes that integration is ‘triggered by a mismatch between efficiency and the existing structure of authority’ (Hooghe and Marks 2008, p. 2). However, it posits that this mismatch does not necessarily lead to functional pressures for more integration. To the extent that a European issue is politicized, i.e. it has high salience, attracts the attention of public opinion and political parties as well as organized interests, and is more contested, it may actually fuel demands for less integration. This is because when public opinion gets drawn in,

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identity concerns are more likely to shape decisions, and in Europe, national identities continue to be stronger than European identities (Citrin and Sides 2004; Zürn and Checkel 2005, p. 1067). Hence politicization unveils a tension between functional demands and a relatively stable set of national identities. Citizens with exclusive national identities can be mobilised by Eurosceptical political parties to oppose further European integration (Hooghe and Marks 2004; Kriesi et al. 2008, 2012). In turn, a more Eurosceptical public makes national governments more hesitant to engage in European integration as they worry about the electoral consequences of their European policies. Therefore, Hooghe and Marks describe the Post-Maastricht era as one of a ‘constraining dissensus’ for national governments. The EU’s external trade policy is an area that has become partially politicized. International trade agreements are contested to the extent that the public perceives them as being dictated by multinationals and negotiated behind closed doors (Meunier 2003). More precisely, the politicization of the EU’s trade policy can be explained by the combination of the ‘(…) perceived “democratic deficit” in the EU; the traditionally distorted interest representation in trade policy-making and therefore the subsequent insulation of the trade policy-making process; and the Pandora’s box of democratic legitimacy complaints opened up in Seattle’ (Meunier 2003, pp. 69-70). How does politicization affect international trade negotiations? I further develop the concept of the ‘constraining dissensus’ by proposing an indirect (M1) and a direct (M2) way in which politicization may influence the positions adopted by Commission officials during trade negotiations. Figure 5.1. illustrates the two ‘constraining dissensus mechanisms’ and each is discussed in the subsequent sections.

Figure 5.1: Two mechanisms by which politicization constrains Commission officials

X = Politicization ofinternational trade negotiations

Y = Commissionofficials’ negotiation positions

M1 = Increased member state control

M2 = Increased transparency

X = Politicization ofinternational trade negotiations

Y = Commissionofficials’ negotiation positions

M1 = Increased member state control

M2 = Increased transparency

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Constraining dissensus mechanism I: Increased member states’ oversightThe first mechanism through which politicization may constrain the positions of Commission officials in the negotiation of international trade deals runs through the member states. Borrowing from Principal-Agent theory (PA), I argue that in response to the domestic politicization of trade deals, member states will increase their control over the negotiation process which, in turn, pushes Commission officials to be more responsive to the immediate public concerns as articulated by the member states. PA theory has originally been developed to examine the contractual relationship between a ‘principal’ and an ‘agent’. To reduce transaction costs or to secure expertise, principals delegate the responsibility to perform a specific task to an agent (Moe 1984). The question here is: how does the principal ensure that the agent follows its preferences and prevent agency losses? The information asymmetry in favour of the agent may allow the agent to follow its own preferences rather than those of its principal (Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991; Pollack 1997; Zimmermann 2004). To overcome the information asymmetry and the risk of agency losses, principals develop mechanisms to control agent activities such as administrative procedures (ex ante control) and monitoring or sanctioning (ex post oversight) (Kassim and Menon 2003, p. 124). To make sense of the PA relationships during the negotiation of international trade agreements, I rely on the ‘three level game’ logic (Collinson 1999; Larsén 2007; Meunier 2000; Pollack 2003). The three level game adapts the classical ‘two level game’ logic to international agreements as developed by Robert Putnam (1988, pp. 435-441). In the case of negotiations between the EU and third parties, we need to add a third arena: the ‘European arena’ (Level II) (Meunier 2000) wedged between the international arena (Level I) in which the Commission negotiates with the third party; and the domestic arena (Level III) in which member states (agents) negotiate with their domestic constituencies (principals). In the European arena, member states negotiate with the European Commission. To assess the impact of politicization on the negotiating behaviour of Commission officials, I focus on the negotiation phase because it offers the best opportunity for observing how member states may seek to constrain Commission officials in a politicized context. During the pre-negotiation phase, the trade deal is unlikely to be publicly salient, whereas during the ratification phase the fate of the trade deal is not in the hands of Commission officials anymore. Member states may attempt to control the Commission by insisting on attending the negotiations

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if the rules of procedure allow so, or by making more pro-active use of the Trade Policy Committee (TPC) (ex. TFEU art. 207(3)) that monitors the Commission. Many scholars have investigated the autonomy of the Commission vis-à-vis the member states in trade policy from a PA perspective (Damro 2007; Delreux 2009, 2011; Dür and Elsig 2011; Elsig 2007; Elsig and Dupont 2012; Larsén 2007; Gastinger 2015). Prior research suggests that politicization may lead member states to tighten the grip over the Commission (Damro 2007; Delreux 2011). In investigating when the Council uses control mechanisms in international negotiations, Chad Damro (2007) concludes that the Commission is more tightly controlled in the case of trade policy than in the case of competition policy because trade policy is more politicized than competition. Likewise, Tom Delreux (2011) shows that the discretion of the Commission in trade negotiations depends on the political sensitivity of the negotiated issues. Delreux investigated the negotiations of the politically sensitive Open Skies agreement between the EU and the US. The Commission’s autonomous mode of operating in these negotiations was met with resistance when the Council rejected the initial proposal of the Commission in 2004. The Open Skies agreement negotiations continued with a much stricter control of the member states and was only accepted in 2007 (Delreux 2011). This is consistent with postfunctionalism which argues that politicization constrains national policy makers as ‘they must look over their shoulders when negotiating European issues’ (Hooghe and Marks 2008, p. 5).

Constraining dissensus mechanism II: Increased transparencyThe second mechanism through which politicization may constrain Commission officials in international trade agreements is via the organizational design of the European Commission. Building on a norm-guided open system approach, I argue that when trade negotiations are politicized domestically, the Commission is pressured to increase the transparency of the negotiations to safeguard its legitimacy, which, in turn, increases Commission officials’ exposure to widespread public interests (Bes 2016) I start from the observation that organizations depend on their environment for self-preservation (Brunsson 1986; DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977; Pfeffer and Salancik 1978; Scott 1981; Weick 1995). This may be because they need the resources or information that the environment can provide them, or because they depend on their environment for support and legitimacy (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977; cf. also Radaelli 2000). Here I am

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most concerned about their need for legitimacy. Politicization places new demands on the capacity of the Commission and its officials to openly address concerns and conflicts rather than to defuse issues behind closed doors (Olsson and Hammergård 2016, p. 2). Hence politicization may push the Commission to ‘open up’. Jonas Tallberg (2013) and colleagues describe how International Organizations (IOs) open up to civil society organizations in response to politicization, whereas Matthias Ecker-Ehrhardt (2016, pp. 15-17) describes how IOs use public communication as a self-legitimation strategy to manage politicization. Another way to increase the legitimacy of an IO, is indeed to become more transparent (Grigorescu 2007). In the 19th century, Jeremy Bentham (1816, p. 29) already argued that within a legislative context, ‘publicity would constrain [emphasis added] members of the assembly to perform their duty’ and secure people’s ‘assent to the measures of the legislature’. In the European Union, the road to greater transparency can be discerned since the difficult ratification of the Maastricht Treaty and the forced resignation of the Santer Commission. Since then, the Commission has been introducing transparency measures to boost its legitimacy (Christiansen 1997; Cini 2016). As Anchrit Wille (2010, p. 1108) describes, ‘[t]ransparency, i.e. more openness and accessibility to the public about its performance as well as responsiveness to the needs and demands [emphasis added] of the general European public have become additional elements of the Commission’s accountability conception that has been emphasised in recent years’. Wille particularly refers to the 2005 European Transparency Initiative that ensures, among other things, transparency about which organized interests negotiate with the Commission, the minimum standards of consultation, and the extension of public access to official documents. In their model of management reform, Christopher Pollitt and Geert Bouckaert (2004, pp. 26-33) indicate that ‘pressure from citizens’ may constitute an ‘important background influence’ for reform. The introduction of transparency measures in the Post-Maastricht era can thus be interpreted as a response of the Commission to its more critical public and political environment (Grigorescu 2007; Hüller 2007). From the Commission’s perspective, Deirdre Curtin and Albert Jacob Meijer (2006) show how the Commission assumes transparency to strengthen the Commission’s input, output, as well as its social legitimacy. The Commission expects that providing information about the policy process increases the public’s ‘social acceptance of policymaking structures’, ‘trust in the benefits the EU brings’, and ‘public confidence in the EU’ (Curtin and Meijer 2006). Hence, transparency is not only theoretically assumed to improve the legitimacy of the Commission, the Commission also perceives this as such.

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A widespread criticism of international trade agreements is that they are in-transparent because they are negotiated behind closed doors. The (non)ratification of the Anti-Counterfeiting Treaty Agreement (ACTA) provides a telling example. On the one hand, ACTA was hailed as an important tool in the battle against counterfeiting and piracy, while, on the other hand, it was condemned as a threat to civil liberties (McManis 2009; Weatherall 2011; Yu 2011). However, the most controversial aspect of the negotiations was its ‘cloak of secrecy’, which stirred strong opposition from consumer advocates and civil liberties groups (Levine 2011; Yu 2011). This secrecy instigated worries amongst the broader public about their personal privacy, leading to mass anti-ACTA protests in various EU member states. Under public pressure, the European Parliament (EP) ultimately rejected the ACTA agreement in June 2012 (Van den Putte et al. 2014). The ACTA case thus shows that citizens are increasingly suspicious of the secrecy surrounding international trade negotiations and demand transparency. To conclude, I argue that when international trade negotiations are politicized, the Commission will become more transparent. This is consistent with Michael Zürn’s (2014, p. 60) hypothesis that international organizations respond to politicization ‘(...) with increased formal transparency as a move to increase legitimacy’. Then, Zürn (ibid. p. 59) hypothesizes that politicized international institutions ‘(...) are less likely to be usurped by special interests and less likely to be used as instruments by executive decision makers to circumvent domestic opposition; they are thus more responsive to societal demands (…)’. Similarly, I expect the Commission to be induced to be responsive to immediate widespread public interests once trade negotiations escape the dark negotiation rooms.

The applied null hypothesis of this study is that Commission officials who are involved in the negotiations of international trade deals are not affected by politicization. Building on the works of Robert Dahl (1965) and Leonard Schapiro (1965), Peter Mair (2007) argues that the EU depoliticizes policy-making because its non-majoritarian institutions do not allow for organized public and political opposition, i.e. a crucial ingredient for politicization. What is more, according to Mair, national governments have deliberately delegated policy-making to the European level to shield it from domestic political pressures (cf. also Schimmelfennig 2014). This argument is consistent with the ‘collusive delegation’ argument that postulates that trade policy-making has intentionally been delegated to the EU to insulate it from traditionally dominant protectionist trade interests (Meunier 2005, p. 8; Nicolaïdis and Meunier 2002, p. 175; Woolcock 2005, p. 247). Protectionist

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trade interests are expected to dominate national trade policy-making because collective action problems impede consumer mobilization, i.e. the supposed winners from trade liberalization (Dür 2008, p. 28). Politicians who are concerned about the negative consequences of protectionism for economic growth therefore want to limit the influence of protectionist forces. By delegating trade authority to the EU, national politicians can insulate the trade policy-making process from such societal interests.

Two Case studies: TTIP and the EU-Japan Free Trade NegotiationsProcess tracing and congruence testingI explore the two constraining dissensus mechanisms by tracing and comparing two ongoing trade negotiations: the politicized TTIP and the depoliticized EU-Japan free trade agreement. To analyse both cases, I use the logics of ‘congruence testing’ and ‘process-tracing’ (cf. George and Bennett 2005). Congruence tests compare to what extent values of the independent and dependent variables co-vary (Bennett 2004, p. 24). So I test whether the predicted value of the dependent variable (responsive vs. unresponsive Commission officials) is congruent with the independent variable (high vs. low politicization). Even though this method corroborates the plausibility of an argument, it does not explicate the causal mechanisms between X and Y. For this, I rely on process-tracing (Beach and Pedersen 2013; Blatter and Haverland 2012; Checkel 2008; George and Bennett 2005; Mahoney 2012) to ‘identify the intervening causal process’ (George and Bennett 2005, pp. 206-207). A process-tracing design is usually aimed to assess causal mechanisms in a single-case design and seeks to make within-case inferences. However, I seek to compare two cases and make inferences across these cases. I use the process-tracing logic in the sense that I aim to analyse the constraining dissensus in a focused and stepwise manner by testing each part of the causal mechanisms, i.e. M1a) politicization leads to increased member state control, M1b) increased member state control leads to a change in the positions of Commission officials during international trade negotiations and M2a) politicization leads to more transparency, M2b) more transparency leads to a change in the positions of Commission officials during international trade negotiations. Table 5.1. shows the mechanisms and how they are investigated.

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Table 5.1: The ‘constraining dissensus’ mechanisms and data sources

X M1 M2 YPoliticization Increased

transparencyIncreased member state control

Commission officials responsive to public demands

Data source:

Case selection Interviews Agenda TPC committee; Interviews

Interviews

DataThe empirical part of this study mainly draws upon two data sources: interviews and the agendas of all the TPC committee meetings between July 2014 to June 2016. In the spring of 2016, I conducted 12 interviews. Except for one official from DG ‘Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union’ (FISMA), all interviews were conducted with officials from DG Trade. The sample includes officials from different ranks, ranging from a policy coordinator to directors who were involved in either TTIP or the EU-Japan negotiations, or both. The interviews were semi-structured and aimed to explore each step of the two constraining dissensus mechanisms and if, and how, Commission officials respond to public interests. Nine officials have been interviewed face-to-face, while two officials have been interviewed over the phone, and one over Skype. On average, an interview lasted about an hour. The questionnaire was organized around four parts. The first part asked about the general trends in the Commission’s trade strategy over the last twenty years and how to explain them. The second part focused on the negotiation phase and how transparency affects the negotiation positions of the Commission. The third part inquired into the influence of different actors and stakeholders in the negotiation of international trade agreements (member states, businesses, NGOs/interest groups, EP, and public opinion). The final part asked whether the respondent expected if the TTIP and/or EU Japan trade deal will be ratified in the end (see the appendix section for the complete interview guide).

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Case selectionThe case selection captures variation in politicization. The first case concerns the politicized negotiations of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). TTIP is a trade agreement between the EU and the US that has been negotiated since 2013. TTIP aims to reduce regulatory barriers, particularly in the areas of food safety law, environmental legislation, and banking regulations. In addition, TTIP also aims to bring about agreements on Intellectual Property rights, such as rules on copyright and trademarks (De Ville and Siles-Brügge 2015; Morin et al. 2015). The TTIP negotiations have become mired in controversy. Fears about TTIP are fuelled by the opacity surrounding the negotiations, but also by public fears of the power that corporations will gain from this Treaty (Stop TTIP 2016). Particularly, the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism clause, that enables corporations to sue governments, has been heavily criticized (Nielsen 2016). In July 2015, the EP adopted a resolution in which it supported TTIP, but rejected the ISDS mechanism (European Parliament 2015). Figure 5.2. shows how opposition against TTIP has steadily increased in almost every member state (except for Belgium, Greece, Lithuania and Luxembourg) between November 2014 and November 2015. My second case deals with the EU-Japan free trade negotiations which has hardly been discussed in public debates even though it has the potential to result in sizable socioeconomic and geostrategic benefits (Kleimann 2015). The EU-Japan negotiations also commenced in 2013 and, just like with TTIP, remain to be concluded. Not only are these negotiations devoid of politicization in Europe,

Table 5.2: Sample overview: length of service, gender, and position in organization

Length of service

< 1992 1993 - 2004 2005 > TotalGender Male 3 6 2 11

Female 1 1

Total 12

Position NDirectorHead of Unit/Deputy Head of UnitPolicy coordinatorTotal

29112

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in Japan they are also publicly overlooked because of the negotiations of another trade deal between, amongst other, Japan and the US: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) (Kleimann 2015; official #09). As David Kleimann (2015, 2) mentions ‘[t]his circumstance [the low level of politicization] has reportedly been welcomed with a sigh of relief behind the walls of the Commission’s headquarters in Brussels. The relatively low degree of transparency of the EU negotiations with Japan reminds observers of EU trade policy practice in pre-Lisbon Treaty times’. This study thus examines whether there is a difference in how Commission officials behave in politicized and depoliticized trade negotiations.

The European Commission and the Constraining DissensusMember state oversight: Business as usual?The most direct way in which the Council of the EU can influence international trade negotiations is through its appointed Trade Policy Committee (TPC) (ex. TFEU art. 207(3)).2 This committee advises and assists the Commission in negotiating trade agreements with third countries or international organizations. Formal positions and proposals of the EU are discussed in the TPC before being submitted to negotiating partners (Reiter 2012, p. 449). The TPC meets in five different configurations. First, the TPC’s ‘full members’, which includes Directors-General or senior officials from national administrations, meet once a month. Every six months, the full members meet in an informal setting in the country that holds the Council presidency. Second, the TPC’s ‘deputy members’ meet once a week. Finally, the TPC comes together around the following three specialized themes: ‘Services and Investment’; ‘Steel, Textiles and other Industrial Sectors’; and ‘Mutual Recognition Agreements’. The TPC is chaired by the Council’s presidency and its secretariat. To trace and compare the oversight of the Council during the EU-Japan and TTIP negotiations, I counted all the TPC agenda points on these two negotiations and aggregated them per month over the period of July 2014 to June 2016. Figure 5.3. shows that the TTIP negotiations appear more often on the TPC agenda than the EU-Japan FTA negotiations. The EU-Japan negotiation, albeit with small margins, is more often on the agenda in only three months: November 2014, March 2015, and May 2015. The peaks in these months can be explained by debriefings of an EU-Japan negotiation round, the 7th, 9th, and 10th respectively. At first sight, the TTIP negotiations are more closely monitored

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by the Council than the EU-Japan negotiations. Note however that the data can merely suggest, but not prove. that politicization is the explanation. We turn to the interviews to interpret the patterns. The consensus opinion among officials is that there is no significant difference in the extent of member state control in TTIP and in the EU-Japan negotiations at Level II when we look at the activity of the TPC (officials #02; #04; #05; #11; #12). Both negotiations are monitored systematically by the TPC and during these meetings ‘TTIP is just one out of the many other agenda items’ (official #04). In the words of official #02: ‘I think the kind of guidance, comments, and direction that I get from the member states on TTIP is very similar to the type of comments and engagement in the case of Japan. Official #12 states: ‘I would say that (….) the difference of public interest between the US and Japan (…), is not comparable to the relative weight given by member states to the negotiations. So public interest with the US is comparatively much, much higher than the interest given by the member states’. Just one source (official #11) qualifies this overall impression by noting that the number of agenda items for TTIP is slightly higher due to the greater political attention from the national parliaments for these negotiations. To ‘get their facts straight’, member states consult the Commission during TPC meetings more often on TTIP than in the case of the EU-Japan negotiations. Overall, though, both negotiations seem to be ‘business as usual’ (official #04; official #10). This picture is quite different once one moves from the formal TPC meetings to other forms of official exchange. Two officials observe that there is much more interaction between the Commission and the member states in the case of TTIP than in the case of Japan (official #4, #10). Thus official #04 argues:

‘We have much more intensive interaction with the member states on the TTIP negotiations. Just to give you an example, in the case of Japan, I think, we have just had the sixteenth round of negotiations, I am not sure if any technical discussion has been organized between member states and the negotiators, while in the case of TTIP, before each and every round, we have technical discussions with member states’.

The engagement of the member states is reportedly a response to their domestic public opinion (official #4, #10). A number of Commission officials point out that member states’ positions on TTIP are more visible in the public debate. Reflecting on the French President Hollande’s ‘Non’ to TTIP (Vinocur 2016), official #11 states that: ‘We have come to a situation where there are political

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parties that have found a good ground to make publicity, to gain votes, and to become popular by running this campaign, they have found a source for their political objectives’. Whereas ‘when it comes to the actual negotiations, we see the (…) typical trade interests, and yes we have a reflection of some concerns, but the people who are from France and other countries, they know what we are talking about, and they know perfectly well which claims are substantiated and which ones are not’ (officials #11). Another official argues that member states have not become more critical as such, but that the increased visibility of their positions, ‘makes it much harder for the member states then to back away from those positions’ (official #03). In the case of TTIP, member states representatives are more vocal to reassure the public or to gain votes. Whereas TTIP is politicized, the EU-Japan negotiations are not. In the specific case of ISDS, civil society and EU citizens apparently do not expect Japanese multinationals to make aggressive use of this system, and hence are not pressuring their member states to change it. The member states do not have to reassure their domestic constituencies in the same way as in the case of TTIP. In the absence of politicization, the limited attention of member states for the EU-Japan negotiations can be explained by the economic sectors at stake. The economies of the EU and Japan are complementary as their key sectors are not in competition. The negotiations with Japan involve ‘zero risk’ for the most sensitive sectors in the EU, most notably agriculture (official #09). Japan relies on import, while the EU is an exporter (official #07). There are ‘only’ three sensitive economic areas, but these concern concentrated producer interests – not the general public. First, the car sector: the EU wants Japan to reduce nontariff barriers on European cars, while Japan wants the EU to eliminate its tariffs on Japanese cars. Second, public procurement: the EU contests Japan’s ‘operational safety clause’ which Japan relies on to reject European railway equipment on the grounds that it does not meet national safety requirements (official #09). Third, agriculture: the EU wants Japan to eliminate tariffs on food and beverages, including pork meat, beef, cereal products, and wine (official #07). What is more, official #10 reminds that member states paid little attention to the EU-Japan FTA because a one year review clause, that has already elapsed, empowers them to halt the negotiations if Japan does not show enough commitment to remove non-tariff trade barriers (cf. also Kleimann 2015). Hence, they were not too worried about the way that the negotiations would go. One final development can be discerned in the interaction between the member states and the Commission. As official #03 explains, a more critical public opinion

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exacerbates the institutional competence fight on the issue of whether trade agreements are shared or mixed competence. To make a stronger connection with their domestic constituencies, member states want their national parliaments to have the final say, reinforcing the PA relationship at Level I.

‘(…) [T]rade agreements were traditionally seen as ‘European agreements’ (…). Over the last five or six years, they [the member states] have changed approach, and are now much stronger at saying, we want our say on these agreements, these are ‘mixed agreements’. So when we propose a final agreement, which we normally would do as an EU only agreement, they will then override us by unanimity in the Council and say, this is a mixed agreement, therefore, it has to be ratified at the EU level, by the Parliament, it has to be signed at the EU level on behalf of the Union, but also signed by each member state individually, and it has to be ratified by each member state’s national parliament’ (official #03).

In October 2014, the then Commissioner for Trade, Karel De Gucht requested a Court opinion on the EU-Singapore free trade agreement to clarify which provisions fall within the EU’s exclusive competence, and which ones are shared and hence require the ratification by all national parliaments. Most officials see this opinion as a precedent for future trade agreements. In July 2016, the Commission clashed with a number of member states by proposing the EU-Canada trade agreement, CETA, as an EU only agreement. After the criticism from several member states on this announcement, Commissioner for Trade, Cecilia Malmström decided to propose it as a mixed agreement instead, yet stated: ‘From a strict legal standpoint, the Commission considers this agreement [CETA] to fall under exclusive EU competence. However, the political situation in the Council is clear, and we understand the need for proposing it as a “mixed” agreement, in order to allow for a speedy signature’ (European Commission 2016c). To conclude, the PA mechanism of the member states seeking to tighten control over negotiations works only partially. It appears to motivate intensified scrutiny by political representatives before and after each negotiation round, but it does not seem to penetrate the technical TPC meetings during the course of the negotiations. That means also that there is little evidence of the Commission having to shift position in the negotiation in response to member state pressure. The actual negotiations remain relatively insulated from politicization.

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Transparency: A (partial) move towards improving legitimacy?Since the 2000s, the objectives of international trade deals have become broader. In addition to removing traditional trade obstacles (e.g. tariffs, limits to public procurement), facilitating trade in goods and services, and ensuring the protection of intellectual property rights, trade agreements have come to include ‘behind-the-border’ trade obstacles, such as labour regulations, food safety standards, and sustainable development provisions (Lamy 2016). As EU trade agreements have started to touch issues that used to be in the domain of domestic regulation, they increasingly gain attention from public and political actors (Lamy 2016). Combined with the prevailing perception of the EU’s trade policy being conducted in secrecy and being too much influenced by the interests of multinationals, more and more public and political actors have demanded a larger role for the European Parliament (EP) in the EU’s trade policy in order to make it more legitimate (Meunier and Nicolaïdis 2011, p. 281; Rosén 2016). As a result, the 2008 Lisbon Treaty codifies a larger role for the EP in the EU’s trade policy. Now, all trade deals are subject to an EP veto. The call for a more open and democratic EU trade policy, especially from civil society groups, has been accelerated during the TTIP negotiations, and it has been noted in the Commission:

‘I think this whole transparency excitement was mainly to get by this famous or infamous TTIP negotiation, and all of a sudden we find ourselves in the centre of public attention, you know, all the accusations that we are going to lower our standards, and we are going to drop our pants vis-à-vis the United States, we will let in all these horrible things like GMOs [Genetically Modified Organism] and the chlorinated chicken’ (official #04).

All interviewees mention how the public and political pressure surrounding the TTIP negotiations has been an important factor in the current Commissioner for Trade, Cecilia Malmström’s push to publish the new ‘Trade for All’ strategy with its focus on transparency towards the public (cf. also Gstöhl 2016, p. 2). Hence, in response to politicization, the European Commission ‘opened up’ because transparency is crucial to achieve ‘accountability’ (official #03). Prominent transparency measures are the 1) online publication of position papers, the first versions of the legal texts, the negotiating mandate (which in

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the case of TTIP leaked very early on in the negotiations), and reports from the negotiation rounds, 2) access for MEPs and NPs to the consolidated texts in so-called ‘reading rooms’, 3) stakeholder consultations during negotiation rounds, 4) the increased utilization of the EU’s Civil Society Dialogue (CSD) (set up in 1998) and 5) the creation of a TTIP advisory group, consisting of 16 experts in consumer interests, labour law, the environment and public health, manufacture, agriculture, and service sectors, that meets before each negotiation round. The interviewees describe how transparency is used as a tool to increase the accountability of the TTIP deal.

‘And to demonstrate that what we are doing is not undermining the domestic regulatory process – you can say it, but of course, the Commission has a credibility issue, national governments have a credibility issue (...) – So I think the best way to say we are not doing it, is to show exactly what you are doing. So, transparency is part of a way of trying for us to, yes, be more accountable but also to come clean and say, look, what we are doing is not what we are accused of. You all know what we are doing, here it is, there is nothing to hide’ (official #02).

While the Commission puts a lot of effort into providing the public with different types of TTIP documents via a special ‘in focus’ webpage, which also includes information on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada and the multilateral Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), there is much less online documentation about the EU-Japan FTA negotiations and this is also more difficult to find. The interviewees state that the transparency measures installed for the TTIP negotiations will gradually be applied to all the other negotiations, including Japan (officials #03; #08). They explain the current difference in transparency by pointing to the limited organizational capacity of DG Trade and the lack of demand for the EU-Japan case. Does increased transparency in the TTIP negotiations influence the negotiation position of the Commission? Whereas the EU-Japan negotiations are described as ‘friendly’ (official #07) and not as much of a ‘battlefield’ as TTIP (official #09), the TTIP negotiations are surrounded by a heated public debate. The interviewees describe how the transparency of the TTIP negotiations affects their negotiation positions to a small degree. The most (in)famous example is the public firestorm around the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), which is intended to solve disputes between governments and foreign investors. Critics of the ISDS argue

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that this system allows multinational companies to bypass national judicial systems, thus undermining democracy, civil rights and the rule of law. As a response, the European Commission launched an online public consultation and suspended the negotiations on investment in TTIP for two years (January 2014 – February 2016). In the process, the Commission developed an alternative to the ISDS which is called the Investment Court System (ICS) (European Commission 2015b). In this new system, judges are no longer appointed by the parties, the proceedings will be more transparent, and there will be a first instance Tribunal and an Appeal Tribunal that operate under similar principles as other permanent international courts (ibid.). Another example is the joint public statement of Commissioner Malmström and US Ambassador Michael Froman on public services in March 2015 (European Commission 2015a). They responded to public concerns that TTIP would prevent national governments to provide services in areas such as water, education, healthcare and social services. UK groups were worried that TTIP would impede the National Health Service (NHS) because this service would have to be opened up to US companies. As official #03 explains, public statements that deny such allegations could work constraining but they could also help to disarm opposition: ‘So you are taking positions in public which are (…) imposing restraints on how you are going to negotiate. And that is something we have always had to deal with in one way or another anyway, because there have always been problems of leaks of information out of the negotiations. But this doing it yourself, and proactively, keeps you ahead of the curve, and I think that is the right way in which we should be developing policies’. Two other officials (#08; #04) argue that the public contestation may make it more difficult to conduct ‘a rational discussion’ with civil society and find common ground. One example is the public fear of chlorinated chicken. While official #04 reassures that the EU is not going to let this ‘horrible chlorinated chicken’ into the EU market, he/she also questions the concerns: ‘In Europe, we have one of the highest numbers of foodborne diseases and all kinds of salmonella, campylobacter. Tens of thousands of people go to the hospital for getting medication because there is a bacterium on the surface of the chicken leg that you buy in the supermarket. This problem can be addressed with washing the surface of the chicken with chlorinated water’ (official #04). On the whole though, Commission officials perceive transparency as a good thing: ‘(…) the more we communicate, the more we can inform about what is going on, the more the stakeholders can know, and the more they can contribute, but also, the more we communicate, the more we are transparent, the more it

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will be difficult to make claims which are outlandish, and not corresponding to the reality’ (official #11). Transparency also increases a sense of ownership: ‘it actually helps me, if I have all my stakeholders behind me say, yes, what official #02 is asking is good, because we know what he is asking for’ (official #02). As a consequence, transparency around a particular position can be used as a bargaining chip: ‘(…) [A]s soon as you have your hands bound because you have published a certain position, and it would be very difficult for you to move, you could use this even in a negotiation, and say look, I mean, my voters, or whatever, have my word. Here is the position I need to take, I cannot move on this. So you could even strengthen your own position with that’ (official #12). In sum, the Commission is pushed to justify its positions more in the case of politicized trade negotiations. Transparency can make it more difficult to find common ground with the societal stakeholders, yet, when there is a common ground, transparency may actually strengthen the Commission’s negotiation position. A number of officials wonder how much the Commission should be transparent. Not only does full transparency make ‘your job as negotiator impossible‘ (official #04), it also adds to the workload (official #04; #08). For example, Commission officials are obliged to reply to access-to-documents requests – ‘then you have someone from a NGO who writes an email of three sentences, takes him five minutes, and one of my colleagues is, I think, busy for a week or two to collect all those documents and send them without it being clear for what purpose. This costs the EU tax payer on average 8.000 EUR. These are amounts that I don’t think can be democratically justified’ (official #08). Which areas of the negotiations can be made transparent, and at what costs to achieving the best deal? Regulatory cooperation does not tend to pose such a dilemma. Regulatory cooperation does not impact the substance of current regulations themselves but relates to cooperation between the two countries involved in the deal about how to regulate new issues that come up, like ‘self-steering cars’ (official #02; official #10). In contrast, as two officials note, the Commission’s position on market access, i.e. trade in goods and custom duties, may be seriously weakened by transparency (official #02; #09): ‘The problem is that, that one [market access] is a poker game. So you tell the Americans, I give you the apples, if you give me the pears, and then I will give you the cards only, if you give me whatever. (…) [W]e both know we are going to arrive here, but you have to deploy tactically one thing at a time to have the game to arrive there’ (official #02). That is why a number of Commission officials were unhappy about the leaks of confidential market access offers by Greenpeace in 2016 and the German Green Party in 2014.

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To conclude, the European Commission is pushed by politicization to make the TTIP negotiations more transparent. In contrast, the depoliticized EU-Japan trade negotiations, are, at least for now, much less transparent in the sense that the Commission publishes far fewer documents. In the one particular case of ISDS, transparency exposed the Commission to such an amount of public criticism, that it had to change its initial position. Otherwise, transparency appears to have only a marginal impact on the negotiation positions of Commission officials. In fact, it may actually be used as a bargaining chip. Transparency is especially provided in the area of regulatory cooperation, whereas the market access chapter is negotiated in confidentiality given its bargain-like nature. For market access, secrecy is needed in order to be able to ‘bluff’ (officials #4, #9).

ConclusionsThis chapter set out to investigate two constraining dissensus mechanisms through which politicization may affect the negotiations of two ongoing trade negotiations: TTIP and the EU-Japan FTA. My first hypothesis is that, in response to domestic politicization, member states will increase their control over the negotiations, which in turn, pushes Commission officials to be more responsive to widespread public interests. My second proposition is that, in response to politicization, the European Commission is pushed to become more transparent, which, in turn, exposes Commission officials to widespread public interests. Both mechanisms foresee that politicization will make trade deals less liberal in character. On the first hypothesis, I find little evidence that the member states increase their control over trade negotiations in response to domestic politicization. Nevertheless, they do increasingly speak out on politicized trade deals to reassure their constituencies. Second, I find that the Commission has become more transparent in the case of the politicized TTIP, but not (yet) in the case of the EU-Japan FTA. In the case of TTIP, Commission officials had to shift their proposals in the area of investment protection accordingly. The first finding suggests that even though member states may in public appear critical in public of TTIP, they do not appear to tighten control over their agent, the Commission. However, domestic politicization does push the member states to make more critical statements about politicized trade negotiations. For example, two politicians from two large member states, i.e. French President Francois Hollande and Germany’s Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel, have expressed doubts about the TTIP deal (Kroet 2016; Vinocur 2016). The EU-Japan negotiations are seemingly progressing much more smoothly. The public

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statements of member states about this deal have been much more positive. The leaders of the EU institutions, Japan, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy instructed their negotiators to accelerate the negotiations and reaffirmed their strong commitment to reach agreement ‘in principle as early as possible in 2016’ in a joint statement during the G7 summit in May 2016 (European Commission 2016b). Politicization hence does invoke the PA relationship between the member states and their domestic constituencies (Level III) in terms of public statements but hardly the PA relationship between the Commission and the member states (Level II). The second mechanism shows that, in order to increase the legitimacy of the trade negotiations, the European Commission makes politicized trade negotiations more transparent. This is consistent with a norm-guided open system approach. The transparency constrains its negotiation positions only marginally. Still, behind the scenes (at Level I) the negotiations between the US and the EU have been tense. In response to the criticism of TTIP by the Commissioner for Agriculture Phil Hogan, US ambassador to the EU, Anthony Gardner, sent an email to all EU permanent representatives criticizing Hogan’s approach. In response, the EU blamed the lack of progress in TTIP on the US, and threatened that, if the US will not change its approach to negotiating TTIP, that there will be no deal before US President Obama leaves office in January 2017 (Heath 2016). This chapter shows that, to the extent that trade negotiations are affected by politicization, the constraining dissensus primarily affects outcomes by inducing internal reform in the European Commission (and by including the European Parliament), and hardly because member states have tightened control. What is more, the impact of the constraining dissensus in the area of international trade is limited, because in the end the Commission has only adjusted its initial positions in one particular area: dispute settlement. In the area of international trade, the Commission thus remains to be a fairly effective shield against politicization. Yet, the form of the ‘shield’ has changed – meaning that the Commission does provide more transparency for international trade negotiations which are politicized among the EU citizens. Ultimately, however, the fate of trade agreements is decided in parliamentary ratification, and at that stage public opinion may well play a decisive role.

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Notes1 Ernst Haas (1976) called this the ‘turbulence’ of public opinion and political parties.2 The origins for the Trade Policy Committee can be traced to Article 113 of the Treaty of

Rome (1957). Whereas the 1991 Maastricht Treaty slightly revised the content of Article 113, the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty renumbered it to Article 133. The Amsterdam Treaty extended the scope of the Common Commercial Policy from negotiations on goods to negotiations on services and intellectual property in cases in which the Council agrees unanimously. The 2000 Treaty of Nice subsequently further altered the framework for the adoption of agreements in the aforementioned two policy areas. Since the 2008 Lisbon Treaty, the Article 113 committee is known as the Trade Policy Committee.

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Appendices

Appendix Chapter II

Table A1: The operationalization of the independent variables per wave

Independent variables

1995-1997 2002 2008

National backgroundNational administration

Years in national administration (biographical data and interview

data, Hooghe 2001)

Ibid., Hooghe (2005)

Ibid., Hooghe (2012)

Federalism Composite index of four variables to measure the extent of regional

governance in one’s home country (Hooghe and Marks 2001)

Ibid. Ibid.

Country size Population size of home country expressed in millions

Ibid. Population size of home country

expressed in thousands

Transnational experience

Dichotomous variable whereby value = 1 when respondents

have had either an international education or profession (Hooghe

2001)

Ibid. Ibid.

Re-socializationExperience in private sector

Dichotomous variable whereby value = 1 when respondents have

prior experience in industry or banking

Ibid. Ibid.

Length in Commission

Years of service in the Commission (interviews, Hooghe 2001)

Ibid. (Hooghe 2005)

Ibid. (Hooghe 2012)

Interaction in Commission

Index of interactions in a typical month with Commissioner,

members of cabinet, Commission president of his cabinet, other/own

DGs, other/ own deputy DGs, or other/own directors, chefs d’unité,

and A8-A5 officials

N/A N/A

T.A1 →

A

169

Position within the Commission

A recoded variable in this survey capturing the senior positions of

1) Directorate-General2) Deputy Directorate-General

3) Director4) Advisor

A recoded variable in this survey capturing the senior

positions of 1) Directorate-

General2) Deputy

Directorate- General

3) Director4) Advisor

5) Head of cabinet

6) Deputy head of cabinet

A recoded variable in this

survey capturing the senior

positions of1) Directorate-

General/Deputy Director-General

2) Advisor/assistant to

Director-General

Strategic calculationPower-DG Composite index of two items

measuring the discretion/power, and reputation of separate DGs, based on data collected by Page

(1997)

Composite index of

three items measuring

DG discretion in regulation,

DG discretion in

adjudication, and DG

reputation (measured in

survey)

Dichotomous variable whereby

value = 1 captures those

respondents working in DGs

with a certain level and scope

of EU authority which is based on a scale of Börzel

(2005)

National benefit

EU structural aid for 1994-1999 as percentage of GDP for each

Member State

EU structural aid for

1994-1999 as percentage

of GDP for each Member

State and extrapolated

to 2002

N/A

National clubness

Index composed of three indicators measuring: degree of cohesion,

organizational resources, and national government’s policy

towards compatriots

Ibid. N/A

T.A1 →

170

Parachutage Dichotomous variable whereby value = 1 are parachutaged into A1

or A2 positions

Dichotomous variable whereby

value = 1 are parachutaged into A1 or A2

positions

N/A

ControlsPolitical ideology

A set of dummies capturing Socialists, Christian democrats, Conservatives, Liberals, Young

socialists, Young Christian democrats, and Young liberals. The ‘young’ captures members from the

party family born in 1940 or later

Self-reported 11-point left/

right scale (Hix and Lord

1997)

Self-reported 11-point left/

right scale and a 11-point GAL/

TAN scale

Experience in admin DG

Dummy variable whereby value = 1 when respondents are in

DGs dealing with “routine administration, implementation, or

adjudication”

Ibid. A recoded variable whereby

value = 1 when respondents are

in administrative DGs

A

171

Table A2: Descriptive statistics for the independent variables in wave 1995-1997

N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. DeviationPre-socializationNational administration 105 0 28 6.01 7.20

Federalism 105 0 10 3.80 2.90

Country size 105 .40 79.30 39.97 25.67

Transnational experience 105 0 1 .43 .50

Re-socializationExperience in private sector 105 0 1 .24 .43

Length in Commission 105 1 38 17.96 10.70

Interaction in Commission 99 1.09 3.59 2.55 .51

Position within Commission 102 1.00 4.00 2.67 .82

Strategic calculationPower DG 105 1 9 4.62 2.04

National benefit 105 .11 3.98 .64 1.03

National clubness 105 0 2 1.30 .82

Seconded national expert 105 0 1 .42 .50

ControlsSocialist + Extreme left 105 0 1 .24 .43

Christian-democrats 105 0 1 .11 .32

Conservative 105 0 1 .06 .23

Liberals + Centrists 105 0 1 .17 .38

Experience in admin DG 105 0 1 .41 .49

Valid N (listwise) 97

172

Tabl

e A

3: C

orre

latio

ns b

etw

een

the

inde

pend

ent v

aria

bles

in w

ave

1995

-199

7

National administration

Federalism

Country size

Transnational experience

Experience in private sector

Length in Commission

Interaction in Commission

Position within Commission

Power DG

National clubness

Seconded national expert

Socialist + Extreme left

Christian democrats

Conservative

Liberals +Centrists

Experience in admin DG

Nat

iona

l ad

min

istra

tion

1

Fede

ralis

m-.2

3**

1C

ount

ry si

ze-.2

4**

.37*

**1

Tran

snat

iona

l ex

perie

nce

-.08

.20*

*-.1

21

Expe

rienc

e in

priv

ate

sect

or-.1

4-.1

3-.1

9*.1

51

Leng

th in

C

omm

issio

n-.5

8***

.22*

*.4

6***

-.11

-.09

1

Inte

ract

ion

in

Com

miss

ion

.04

-.28*

**-.1

8*-.0

8.0

5-.1

61

Posit

ion

with

in

Com

miss

ion

-.16

.06

-.05

-.19*

*-.1

4.2

4*-.1

61

Pow

er D

G.0

7-.0

1.0

2-.1

4-.1

8**

-.07

.10

.02

1

Nat

iona

l clu

bnes

s.2

6***

-.02

.31*

**-.2

7***

.01

-.10

.04

-.09

-.02

1Se

cond

ed n

atio

nal

expe

rt.5

3***

-.06

-.31*

**.0

8-.0

2-.7

3***

.17*

-.30*

**.0

6.0

41

Soci

alist

+ E

xtre

me

left

-.17*

*.1

5.2

4.1

0-.1

0.0

7.0

6-.1

2-.0

2.0

6-.0

21

Chr

istia

n-de

moc

rats

-.05

.09

-.36*

**.1

1.0

8.0

5-.0

1.1

8**

.01

-.17*

-.06

-.20*

*1

Con

serv

ativ

e.1

1-.2

2**

.00

-.05

.08

-.06

.09

-.15

.01

.11

.04

-.14

-.09

1

Libe

rals

+ C

entr

ists

.02

-.00

-.09

.06

.16

-.20*

*.0

5-.2

7***

-.03

.11

.13

-.25

-.16*

-.11

1Ex

perie

nce

in a

dmin

D

G.1

0.0

4.0

3-.1

3-.1

0-.1

3-.0

8.0

2.4

0***

.04

.04

.03

-.12

.04

-.02

1

***p

<.0

1; *

*p<

.05;

*<

.10

A

173

Table A4: Descriptive statistics for the independent variables in wave 2002

N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. Deviation

Pre-socializationNational administration 93 0 29 4.89 7.27

Federalism 93 0 10 4.91 3.15

Country size 93 .40 79.30 40.98 26.33

Transnational experience 92 0 1 .49 .50

Re-socializationExperience in private sector 93 0 1 .18 .39

Length in Commission 93 2 41 19.56 10.00

Position within Commission 93 1 6 3.39 1.22

Strategic calculationPower DG 93 1 9 4.66 1.83

National benefit 93 .11 3.98 .71 1.04

National clubness 93 1 3 2.26 .85

Seconded national expert 93 0 1 .37 .48

ControlsLeft-Right 91 1.50 8.00 4.97 1.48

Experience in admin DG 93 0 1 .41 .49

Valid N (listwise) 90

174

Tabl

e A

5: C

orre

latio

ns b

etw

een

the

inde

pend

ent v

aria

bles

in w

ave

2002

National administration

Federalism

Country size

Transnational experience

Experience in private sector

Length in Commission

Position within Commission

Power DG

National benefit

National clubness

Seconded national expert

Left-Right

Experience in admin DG

Nat

iona

l ad

min

istra

tion

1

Fede

ralis

m.0

31

Cou

ntry

size

-.27*

**.5

3***

1

Tran

snat

iona

l ex

perie

nce

-.17

.02

-.16

1

Expe

rienc

e in

priv

ate

sect

or-.2

9***

-.05

-.08

-.02

1

Leng

th in

Com

miss

ion

-.47*

**.1

7.4

3***

-.09

-.03

1

Posit

ion

with

in

Com

miss

ion

-.11

-.14

-.09

-.04

-.08

-.14

1

Pow

er D

G-.0

5.1

4-.1

6.0

0.0

1.0

3-.1

01

Nat

iona

l ben

efit

.03

-.30*

**-.4

0***

.24

.04

-.19*

-.15

-.18*

1

Nat

iona

l clu

bnes

s.1

1-.0

0.3

5***

-.45*

**.0

2.0

2-.0

7-.1

6-.3

2***

1

Seco

nded

nat

iona

l ex

pert

.43*

**-.0

5-.3

2***

.13

-.07

-.54*

**-.1

3.0

9.1

7*-.1

31

Left-

Rig

ht.0

3-.1

1-.0

3.0

4.2

4**

.03

-.18*

.07

.01

.07

.08

1

Expe

rienc

e in

adm

in

DG

-.17

-.01

.02

-.05

.00

.16

.08

.42*

**-.1

3-.1

0-.1

3-.0

31

***p

<.0

1; *

*p<

.05;

*<

.10

A

175

Table A6: Descriptive statistics for the independent variables in wave 2008

N Minimum Maximum Mean Std. DeviationPre-socializationNational administration

1829 0 18 2.68 4.60

Federalism 1829 0 29 15.05 9.18

Country size 1829 408 822368 35660.88 27275.09

Transnational experience

1825 0 1 .60 .49

Re-socializationExperience in private sector

1829 0 1 .36 .48

Length in Commission 1829 1 45 12.53 9,09

Position within Commission

1762 0 5 4.37 1.03

Strategic calculationPower DG 1775 0 1 .36 .48

Politicization

Euro scepticism 1785 -7.96 18.04 0 7.25

Salience 1785 -.49 .77 0 .28

ControlsLeft-Right 1765 0 10 5.46 2.00

GAL-TAN 1766 0 10 3.68 2.50

Experience in admin DG

1762 1 5 4.37 .49

Valid N (listwise) 1645

176

Tabl

e A

7: C

orre

latio

ns b

etw

een

the

inde

pend

ent v

aria

bles

in w

ave

2008

National administration

Federalism

Country size

Transnational experience

Experience in private sector

Length in Commission

Position within Commission

Power DG

Euroscepticism

Salience

Left-Right

GAL-TAN

Experience in admin DG

Nat

iona

l adm

inist

ratio

n1

Fede

ralis

m-.1

2***

1

Cou

ntry

size

-.09*

**.4

7***

1

Tran

snat

iona

l exp

erie

nce

-.11*

**-.1

4***

-.07*

**1

Expe

rienc

e in

priv

ate

sect

or-.3

1***

.06*

**-.0

2-.0

31

Leng

th in

Com

miss

ion

-.13*

**.2

3***

.16*

**-.1

6***

-.03

1

Posit

ion

with

in

Com

miss

ion

-.07*

**-.0

5**

-.05*

*-.0

0.0

9***

-.36*

**1

Pow

er D

G.0

5*-.0

8***

-.02

.04*

-.07*

**-.1

3***

.08*

**1

Euro

scep

ticism

.03

-.24*

**.1

3***

-.02

-.04

.16*

**-.1

0***

.02

1

Salie

nce

-.03

-.30*

**-.1

1***

.14*

**.0

4*-.2

0***

.07*

**.0

3-.2

1***

1

Left-

Rig

ht.0

0-.1

5***

-.17*

**.0

1.0

4-.1

7***

.01

.10*

**-.0

5**

.03

1

GA

L-TA

N.0

4*-.0

1-.0

0-.0

3.0

0-.0

0.0

3.0

1-.0

7***

.06

.13*

**1

Expe

rienc

e in

adm

in D

G.0

2-.0

4*-.0

2-.0

8***

.02

.04*

-.05*

-.11*

**-.0

1-.0

5**

-.05*

*-.0

01

***p

<.0

1; *

*p<

.05;

*<

.10

A

177

Appendix Chapter III

Interview request (in Dutch)

Bart Joachim Bes, MS.cAfd. Politieke en BestuurswetenschappenVrije Universiteit AmsterdamDe Boelelaan 10811081 HV AmsterdamNederlandEmail: b.j.bes@vu.nlTel: +31 (0)6 409 967 22

Amsterdam, 24 september 2013

INTERVIEW OVER DE ROLOPVATTINGEN VAN EUROPESE TOPAMBTENAREN

Geachte heer/mevrouw X,

Momenteel werk ik aan mijn promotie project aan de Vrije Universiteit te Amsterdam, onder supervisie van Dr. Ben Crum en Prof. Liesbet Hooghe, waarin de rolopvattingen van EU topambtenaren over de afgelopen 15 jaar in kaart worden gebracht.

Met rolopvattingen wordt bedoelt hoe topambtenaren de positie van de Commissie zien binnen de EU en in Europese integratie in het bijzonder; moet de Commissie de overheid worden van de EU of moeten lidstaten het primaat behouden in het EU besluitvormingsproces? Eerder onderzoek laat zien dat de opvattingen van topambtenaren in de Commissie op dit punt steeds diverser zijn geworden. De vraag die ik in dit deelproject wil onderzoeken is in hoeverre deze ontwikkeling het gevolg is van de toegenomen politisering van Europese integratie gedurende de afgelopen 20 jaar. Ik richt me daarbij specifiek op de Nederlandse topambtenaren omdat juist in Nederland Europese integratie de afgelopen jaren een aantal keren flink ter discussie heeft gestaan.

Tegen deze achtergrond wil ik u vragen of u bereid bent tot een interview over dit onderwerp. Graag zou ik een interview van ongeveer 30 à 45 minuten met u afleggen in de periode tussen 21 en 30 oktober 2013 in Brussel. Mocht u niet face-to-face beschikbaar zijn in deze periode, dan is het natuurlijk ook mogelijk om het

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interview op een andere manier te organiseren.

Uiteraard bepaalt u de condities van het interview; anonimiteit wordt gegarandeerd en graag stuur ik u achteraf een transcript van het interview ter goedkeuring.Alvast bedankt voor u tijd.

In afwachting van uw reactie verblijf ik,

Hoogachtend,

Bart Joachim Bes

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Bijlage: Interview checklist

Interview Checklist

Om een idee te geven van de inhoud van het interview staan beneden de belangrijkste onderwerpen die worden besproken. Afhankelijk van de loop van het gesprek zal het ene onderwerp meer aandacht krijgen dan het andere. Met de ‘politisering van Europese integratie’ wordt bedoelt dat Europese besluitvorming meer zichtbaar is geworden in nationale publieke debatten met als gevolg een meer pluriforme en omstreden Europese besluitvorming.

A) Carrière verloop-Professionele achtergrond-Redenen om voor de Commissie te werken-Huidige positie in de Commissie

B) Visie op de rol van de Commissie (heden en verleden)-Moet de Commissie de overheid van de EU worden?-Moeten de lidstaten het primaat houden in EU besluitvorming?

C) Belangrijkste informatie bronnen-Op nationaal niveau-Op internationaal niveau-Bestaat er een pan-Europese publieke sfeer?

D) Politisering-Is het EU besluitvormingsproces veranderd?-Beïnvloedt politisering de visie van Commissie ambtenaren?-Beïnvloedt politisering de legitimiteit van de Commissie?

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Interview questionnaire

A priori checklist

For the sake of efficiency, fill out the checklist below before the interview. In case this information is not available, incorporate these questions in the interview.

1. Name interviewee:………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

2. Gender:Man Woman

3. What is your date of birth?………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

4. What position do you currently hold in the European Commission (position, DG)?………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

5. How long do you work for the European Commission? (How long do you work in your current position?)………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

6. What job(s) have you had before your current one (within the Commission, national/ international, public/private)?……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

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7. Are you, or have you been, active in (inter)national/local politics or societal organizations?

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

8. What is your highest educational qualification? And in what discipline? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

9. Have you studied abroad for longer than six months?Yes No

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Interview scheme officials European Commission

Semi-structured

The goal of this interview is to explore to what degree the politicization of the European Union in the Netherlands influences the attitudes of Dutch Commission officials. Politicization means that issues that are decided upon at the European level have become more visible and polarized in the Dutch public sphere (since the beginning of this century). The investigation primarily aims to explore how civil servants conceive of the role of the European Commission within European decision-making. Before we start; would you mind if I record the interview? If not, would you like to receive a transcript for your approval?

A) BackgroundIf necessary, complement with questions from the a-priori checklist1. What was your most important reason to work for the European Commission?

B) Institutional role conception of the European Commission1. Provide the interviewee with the hand-out containing the two items. These need to be

answered on a 5-points scale which ranges from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree), whereby 3 is a neutral category.

2. After the items are answered by the interviewee: Can you elaborate on your answers to these two items? What do you mean with..?

3. Has your conception of the Commission’s role changed with respect to the role conception you had when you started to work for the Commission? If so, because of what events (internal, external), or for what reasons?

I would like to ask you a number of questions about your most important sources of information. First your sources for your personal news consumption, and then the external sources which you use for your specific policy responsibilities.

C) Sources of information: News1. What sources do you normally use to follow the news?2. Do you follow the Dutch debates about European integration?3. Which sources do you use to follow this news? (international or national)4. [Do you have the impression that the Dutch debates about European integration are

different or comparable with those in other countries? If there is a difference, what is the difference according to you?]

5. What do you think about the tone of the Dutch debates about Europe? Do the debates affect you personally?

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D) Sources of information: Policy1. Which actors, outside of the Commission, are most important for performing your job

(information)?2. To what extent are your contacts with Dutch actors different than with comparable

European actors, both in terms of frequency and substance/atmosphere?3. Have your contacts with Dutch actors changed since the beginning of this century, both in

terms of frequency and substance/atmosphere? (If so, what do you think about this?)

E) Politicization of European Union1. Do you think that the Commission is more visible in the societies of the member states, in

the sense that 1) increasingly more national actors (public, political parties) are involved in the European decision-making process and that 2) the Commission has to justify its policies towards a bigger group of actors (even on a micro level against your own family/friends)?

2. Do you notice the increased politicization of the European Union in the Netherlands in your daily functioning? If so, how?

3. Does politicization influence your daily functioning?4. [Is this a good thing? Or is this a bad thing? What is good about it? What is bad about it?]5. Does politicization influence your conception of the Commission’s role? Has it made you

more critical about policy-making at the European level, or more appreciative? If so, how and why?

6. Does politicization influence your colleagues’ conception on the Commission’s role? Did it make them more critical about policy-making on the European level, or more appreciative? If so, how and why?

F) Outro1. What is in your eyes the biggest challenge for the European Commission in the coming

decennium?2. Do you see yourself still working for the Commission in ten years?

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Appendix Chapter IV

Table A8: Number of Commission officials per country in the sample

Nationality Frequency Percent CumulativeAustria 39 2.18 2.18

Belgium 180 10.08 12.27

Bulgaria 21 1.18 13.45

United Kingdom 138 7.73 21.18

Czech Republic 42 2.35 23.53

Denmark 35 1.96 25.49

Netherlands 54 3.03 28.52

Estonia 16 0.90 29.41

France 223 12.49 41.90

Finland 36 2.02 43.92

Germany 183 10.25 54.17

Greece 73 4.09 58.26

Hungary 71 3.98 62.24

Italy 162 9.08 71.32

Ireland 37 2.07 73.39

Latvia 20 1.12 74.51

Lithuania 27 1.51 76.02

Poland 125 7.00 83.03

Portugal 59 3.31 86.33

Romania 14 0.78 87.11

Slovakia 20 1.12 88.24

Slovenia 17 0.95 89.19

Spain 146 8.18 97.37

Sweden 47 2.63 100

Total 1.785 100Note: The total N in this table is larger than the number of respondents used in the analysis. This is caused by missing values on the dependent variable (Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions).

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Table A9: Distribution of Euroscepticism and Salience per country

Country Euroscepticism SalienceAustria 12.04 .38

Belgium -3.96 -.26

Bulgaria -5.96 .77

Czech Republic -2.96 .39

Denmark -1.96 -.49

Estonia -6.96 -.20

France 3.04 .06

Finland 6.04 -.04

Germany -5.96 -.21

Hungary 7.04 .06

Italy 3.04 -.02

Ireland -7.96 -.44

Latvia 2.04 -.14

Lithuania -4.96 -.13

Netherlands -4.96 -.20

Poland -7.96 .35

Portugal 1.04 .11

Romania -7.96 .64

Slovakia -7.96 -.08

Slovenia -2.96 .32

Spain -5.96 .20

Sweden 8.04 -.48

United Kingdom 18.04 -.25

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Appendix Chapter V

Interview request

VU University AmsterdamDepartment of Political Science and Public AdministrationDe Boelelaan 10811081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlandsb.j.bes@vu.nl+31 (0)6 409 967 22

Amsterdam, 5 April 2016

INTERVIEW REQUEST ON THE NEGOTATIONS OF TTIP

Dear Mr./Ms. X,

My name is Bart Bes and I am doing a Ph.D. in Political Science at the VU University Amsterdam, under the supervision of Prof. Ben Crum and Prof. Liesbet Hooghe. In my current research project, I examine how the more critical public and political environment around trade may 1) affect the trade agenda and strategy of the Commission, 2) influence the autonomy of the Commission during negotiations, and 3) inform organizational reform. Because of your prominent position in the negotiations of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), I would like to request an interview with you.

The backdrop of this project is the increased politicization of trade negotiations, starting with the protests at the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle and continuing through EU summits (Nice, Gothenburg), the ratification of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and the current case of TTIP. While criticisms on trade policies differ, a common concern seems to be that free trade agreements are negotiated behind closed doors and mostly serve specific business interests – a concern that is now explicitly addressed in the EU’s new trade strategy: ‘Trade for All: Towards a responsible trade and investment policy’.

Ideally, I would like to meet you for around 30 to 45 minutes at some point between 12 and 22 April. In case you are not available face-to-face in this period, other arrangements can be made. You will of course be invited to determine the terms of the interview, such as the date and length. I guarantee anonymity and will be happy to provide you with a transcript for your approval.

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Many thanks for taking my request into consideration and I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,

Bart Joachim Bes

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Attachment: Interview checklist

Interview Checklist

Below the topics are indicated which will be addressed in the interview. Depending on the conversation, some topics will be discussed more extensively than others.

A) The evolution of the organisation of trade negotiations -Main reformsB) The evolution of the Commission’s trade agenda -Description -Explanation -Personal evaluationC) The evolution of the autonomy of the Commission in trade negotiations -Role of the Council -Role of the European Parliament -Role of interest groups/businesses -Role of public opinionD) The evolution of the Commission’s trade strategyE) Assessment of political (and public) climate around trade

A

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Interview scheme officials European Commission

Semi-structured

The purpose of this interview is to explore the evolution of international trade negotiations, against the backdrop of a more critical public and political environment around trade. Before we start, would you mind if I record the interview? And, would you like to receive a transcript for your approval? How would you like to be referred to in the research and possible publications?

Besides TTIP/EU-Japan FTA, are you, or have you been, involved in other trade negotiations?

Now I will start with a few general questions about the evolution of international trade negotiations and will follow up with more specific questions about the TTIP/EU-Japan negotiations

Intro: The Commission’s Trade Strategy(public interests vs. trade liberalization)1. Could you please describe how, in your view, the Commission’s trade strategy

has evolved over the last 20 years, and what the most important changes are?2. How can we explain these changes in the Commission’s trade strategy? 3. The new trade strategy ‘Trade for All’ emphasizes transparency. Why, in your

view, has the Commission introduced measures to make international trade negotiations more transparent?

The Commission’s room for manoeuvre to achieve its trade objectives in trade negotiations(public interests vs. trade liberalization)Pre-negotiation phase1. You have been [position] From the outset, what does the Commission want to

get out of the TTIP/EU-Japan negotiations?2. Who decides the Commission’s trade objectives?

Negotiation phase: transparency1. Does the increased transparency affect the Commission’s discretion to achieve

its trade objectives during the negotiations? 2. Is there a relation between increased transparency and the political direction

of trade negotiations?

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3. How do transparency measures influence your negotiation strategies during the negotiation of trade deals?

Negotiation phase: actors1. Which are the most important actors that constrain, or have tried to constrain,

the Commission’s discretion to achieve its trade objectives during the TTIP/EU-Japan negotiations?

2. Can you explain why (member states, EP, interest groups) try to constrain the room of maneuver for the Commission?

3. Is there a relation between the intensity of member state oversight and the political direction of trade negotiations?

4. How do member states influence your negotiation strategies during the negotiations of TTIP/EU-Japan?

5. How influential are businesses during the negotiation of TTIP/EU-Japan negotiations?

6. How influential are NGOs/public interest groups during the TTIP/EU Japan negotiations?

7. How influential is the European Parliament during the TTIP/EU Japan negotiations?

8. What is the role of public opinion in international trade negotiations? Is there a relation between the widespread concerns of public opinion and the political direction of trade negotiations?

9. How does public opinion influence your negotiation strategies during the negotiation of TTIP/EU-Japan?

Outro: Ratification1. Do you think that TTIP/EU-Japan trade deal will be ratified in the end?

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SummaryEver since the difficult ratification of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the executive of the European Union (EU), i.e. the European Commission, has come to operate in a radically different political and public environment (Bickerton et al. 2015; Kassim et al. 2013; Wonka 2015, pp. 91-93). Before this time, Commission officials mainly prepared EU policy-making with political and economic elites out of the public’s view. The Post-Maastricht era, however, has witnessed ‘the politicization of the EU’. EU policy-making has now become more visible and widely contested amongst a growing number of actors, not least national publics (Franklin et al. 1994; Hooghe and Marks 2008; Kriesi et al. 2008). Dissatisfied with the EU’s nascent authority and the citizens’ lack of influence on the EU policy-making process, politicization challenges the nature of the EU polity itself and raises the question of its legitimacy (De Wilde 2011). Scepticism is often targeted at the ‘undemocratic’ Commission and its staff. Commission officials are portrayed as Europhiles who are concerned only with pushing European integration forward (Brack and Costa 2012, p. 101). Against this backdrop, this dissertation asks: ‘What explains the institutional role conceptions and behaviour of Commission officials in the Post-Maastricht era?’ To answer this question, this dissertation focuses on the extent to which Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions and policy-making behaviour are affected by the politicization of the EU polity. To unpack this question, Chapter II starts by mapping the institutional role conceptions of Commission officials, with the use of three waves of representative surveys conducted in the mid 1990s, 2002 and late 2008. The concept of ‘institutional role conception’, as applied in this dissertation, refers to how Commission officials conceive the role of their institution within EU decision-making. To assess variation in this particular type of attitude, I make use of a refined version of Liesbet Hooghe’s (2012) typology of institutional role conceptions, which ranges from the ‘supranationalist’ view, that the Commission should be the government of the EU, to the ‘state-centric’ view, that the Commission should accommodate member states’ interests. The Chapter shows that, while the supranationalists constitute the largest group in the Commission, they are far from hegemonic. In fact, the institutional role conceptions have become increasingly more diverse and nuanced over time. The Chapter continues by testing the conventional approaches to explaining EU officials’ attitudes: 1) European re-socialization (Egeberg 1999; Henökl 2014; Trondal 2007), which theorizes that the organizational objectives and the social environment of the Commission re-socializes its officials into having supranationalist attitudes; 2) national pre-socialization (Hooghe 2005, 2012; Kassim et al. 2013), which hypothesizes that Commission officials’ attitudes are determined by their national experiences before they enter the Commission, and thus vary per nationality; and 3) strategic calculation (Franchino 2007; Pollack 2003), which supposes that

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Commission officials’ attitudes are shaped by rational cost-benefit analyses, inducing them to favour more European integration and thus adopt supranationalist attitudes. I find that national pre-socialization provides the best explanation for understanding Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions. These findings subsequently leave us with the following paradox: while Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions have become more diverse and more nuanced, they are best explained by relatively static national background factors, such as the degree of federalism and population size of one’s home country. To transcend this paradox, I explore the influence of a dynamic national background variable: the politicization of the EU in the home countries of Commission officials. Chapter III develops propositions on how politicization may affect the institutional role conceptions of Commission officials by combining the literature on EU politicization (De Wilde 2011; Hooghe and Marks 2008; Rauh 2016; Statham and Trenz 2015; Zürn et al. 2012) with a norm-guided open system approach (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977). From the latter, I take that organizations depend on their environment as it provides them with support and legitimacy (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Meyer and Rowan 1977). Organizations align their structures with widely recognized norms and values in their environment so as to maintain their legitimacy. From this perspective, politicization, which comes along with challenges to the legitimacy of the EU polity (De Wilde 2011; Statham and Trenz 2015), should make the Commission more open to its (Euro critical) environment. I argue, however, that not only organizational structures respond to legitimacy challenges, but also the individuals who work within these organizations. For the Commission to perceive itself as legitimate, it is important for its officials to perceive the role of the Commission to be consistent with prominent norms and values in its environment. Politicization may therefore push Commission officials to reconsider their (predominantly supranationalist) institutional role conception. I evaluate these theoretical propositions in an exploratory case study of Dutch Commission officials (n = 21). The study tentatively confirms that, in varying degrees, politicization pushes Commission officials to moderate their (supranationalist) institutional role conceptions. Chapter IV goes on to further specify the influence of politicization on Commission officials’ attitudes through a quantitative estimation of how Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions are affected by the Euro scepticism in their home country. Here I draw on the theory of Representative Bureaucracy, a variant of the open system’s theories. Representative Bureaucracy contends that a bureaucracy staffed by officials that are representative of the different societal groupings will be responsive to the wishes and demands its constituency (Meier 1993a; Saltzstein 1985; Selden 1997). Consistent with the national pre-socialization thesis, the

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theory explains how personal attributes, such as class, gender, or ethnicity, lead to particular early socialization experiences that enable bureaucrats to identity with the interest of specific parts of the political community which they serve (Krislov 1974; Saltzstein 1979). When applying the theory of Representative Bureaucracy to the Commission, nationality is a particularly salient attribute. This leads me to assume that Commission officials respond to the (Euro sceptic) signals of their compatriots by adjusting their institutional role conceptions in a more state-centric direction. However, I add to the theory of Representative Bureaucracy that Euro scepticism only elicits attitudinal change amongst Commission officials when, at the same time, the EU is publically salient in their home countries. Salient issues are attention-grabbing and serve as a referent that Commission officials use to judge current or expected demands from the domestic political arena. I assess this relationship with the use of three datasets. First, the 2008 wave of survey data which captures a wide range of attitudes amongst a sample of Commission officials (N = 1.649). Second, Euro scepticism is measured with the use of the 2008 wave of Eurobarometer data, whereas, third, EU salience is operationalized as salience of the EU amongst national political parties, which is derived from the 2006 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) (Hooghe et al. 2010). The analysis presents an unexpected finding: Commission officials from countries in which the EU is salient adopt a more supranationalist view on the Commission in response to Euro scepticism in their home country, while Commission officials from countries in which the EU is not salient adopt a more state-centric view in response to Euro scepticism at home. I explain this result with the work of Antonis Ellinas and Ezra Suleiman (2012). They find that when Commission officials are faced with an adverse environment, they tend to legitimate themselves ‘from within’ by denouncing the Euro scepticism and justifying their authority and existence themselves. Self-legitimation then reinforces supranationalism in the Commission. In Chapter V, the focus shifts from Commission officials’ institutional role conceptions to their policy-making behaviour. I assess how the politicization of external trade affects the positions that Commission officials adopt in the negotiations of international trade agreements. To investigate this, I compare the processes of two ongoing trade negotiations: the politicized Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the publically overlooked negotiations of the EU-Japan free trade agreement. I formulate two mechanisms that can be expected to constrain Commission officials, in the sense that their default preferences for free trade are adjusted to accommodate public concerns. First, borrowing from Principal-Agent (PA) theory (Kiewiet and McCubbins 1991; Moe 1984; Pollack 1997), I hypothesize that when international trade agreements are politicized, negotiations are more tightly controlled by member states which, in turn, pushes Commission officials to be more responsive to the immediate public concerns as

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articulated by the member states. Second, drawing on a norm-guided open system approach, I further hypothesize that politicized international trade negotiations are made more transparent in order to maintain their legitimacy. Transparency, in turn, increases Commission officials’ exposure to widespread public interests. Still, as trade authority has been placed under the EU’s exclusive competence, trade policy may be a hard target for politicization. The EU is argued to depoliticize policy-making because its non majoritarian institutions do not allow for organized public and political opposition (Mair 2007; Schimmelfennig 2014). The null hypothesis is therefore that Commission officials who are involved in the negotiations of international trade deals are not affected by politicization. I explore all three hypotheses through interviews with 12 Commission officials who are involved in either one or both of the negotiations. To assess member states’ oversight, I analyze the agenda items of the Trade Policy Committee (TPC). I find that the politicization of international trade negotiations pushes the European Commission to become more transparent about its mode of operation. I do not find tighter control of the member states on a politicized negotiation process. All in all, I detect little evidence that the Commission has had to adjust its initial positions substantially. Hence, even though politicization pushes the Commission to become more transparent, it does not affect the actual policy-making behaviour of Commission officials in the particular case of international trade negotiations. Altogether, this dissertation shows that the Commission does not operate as an ‘ivory tower’ insulated from widespread public and political demands. I demonstrate that the Commission is responsive to its environment, and that Commission officials’ attitudes are sensitive to politicization. However, the direction of the attitudinal effect is moderated by EU salience. When the EU is less salient, politicization appears to induce Commission officials to moderate their supranational institutional role conceptions. Concerns about legitimacy and subsidiarity nudge them towards a more pragmatic stance that seeks a middle ground between supranationalist and state-centric views. In times of salient EU debates however, Commission officials tend to disagree with public criticism and actually grow a thicker ‘supranationalist’ skin. To explain this, this dissertation argues that politicization heightens the tension between competing claims of legitimacy: a process-based legitimacy that stems from appropriate democratic input and procedures (Føllesdal and Hix 2006) and an output-based legitimacy that is rooted in technocratic expertise (Majone 2000; Moravcsik 2002). This puts Commission officials between a rock and hard place; should they follow the public’s wishes, irrespective of the output, or should they focus on optimal output and hope the public falls in line? One thing is certain: politicization is not going to go away any time soon. Against this backdrop, Commission officials will have to keep ‘reinventing’ their institutional role conceptions as they struggle to align them with their need for legitimization.

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