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

The latest recommendations issued by the European Commission go towards the revision of their policy on dissemination and preservation of scientific information: the aim is to promote access to the results of the community-funded research by especially implementing the open access policy within 'Horizon 2020', the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2014-2020). The growth of "fast" documentation - which is not long-term preserved or not available in stable URLs and repositories - pushed the European Commission to produce a set of guidelines for the management of documentation at-large and of specialized documentation produced within funded projects in particular. Those guidelines try to conciliate the visibility of the project activities in two directions: "a) better quality and user-friendliness of project websites, triggering higher popolarity b) better visibility for the projects and the European Commission due to a more standardized format". The EC guidelines proved to be a very useful tool for optimizing and handling information on the dedicated portals of the community-funded projects: the general recommendations, for example, focus the attention on the importance of using social media as well as webmaster tools and virtual meeting facilities (as web streaming) and of adopting an "eu" domain. Moreover, specific directives are given not only for the structure of the project homepage but often for the web site framework as well: homepage, project overview, consortium, management structure, scientific methodology and expected documentation. Given this scenario, the web sites of these projects represent an essential vehicle for both the acquisition and the diffusion of grey literature and could also become an important resource within an European infrastructure able to overcome the disconnected and scattered nature of their content in order to optimise their riutilization. Although the term "grey literature" (GL) has never been explicitly mentioned in the Commission guidelines, it is widely known that a good amount of documentation produced within the EC projects is made up of deliverables, e-newsletters, brochures, posters, flyers, videos, project factsheets, photographs. Starting from this condition, this paper analyses the GL production available on European Projects dedicated web sites, using a sample of projects selected from EU-CORDIS. The aim of the survey is then to identify, measure, evaluate the usability and availability of grey literature provided by the European Commission projects web sites in order to verify whether this type of literature is compliant with EU recommendations. It is also important to assess to which extent grey literature is reusable for "nourishing" the European platform infrastructures devoted to the storage, dissemination and conservation of such research product.

This article argues that the European Commission is an unelected legislator. Although the Commission is rarely defined de jure as a legislative body within the EU's system of governance, it does serve as a de facto legislator in three important respects. First, the Commission's role as an agenda-setter & policy formulator gives it a great deal of influence over legislative outcomes. Second, it performs an important regulatory role. While this includes the direct implementation of European legislation in a small number of policy areas, such as competition policy, it also results from the delegation of important executive functions from the EU Council to the Commission. Thus, the Commission is responsible for much of the specific content of legislative acts, with the Council & Parliament deciding on the general framework. Third, the Commission also performs an informal function as policy-maker, epitomized by the expanding Commission preference for the use of soft law & other non-binding measures. While there is some debate as to whether soft law really is "law", the political (if not the legal) effects of such measures are potentially enormous. Adapted from the source document.

Ex-post evaluations are a potential tool to improve regulatory interventions and to hold rule-makers accountable. For these reasons the European Commission has promised to systematically evaluate its legislation, but it remains unclear if actual evaluation capacity is being built up in the Commission's Directorates-General. This article describes and explains the variation in evaluation capacity between the Directorates-Generals by applying a theoretical model of evaluation capacity developed by Nielsen et al. to the European context. To gain an in-depth understanding of the Directorates-Generals' evaluation capacity, 20 Commission officials were interviewed. The results show that there is much variation in the extent to which Directorates-Generals prioritize evaluation as well as in the amount of human and technological capital that they invest in evaluation. Further analysis using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis reveals that part of this variation can be explained by the Directorates-Generals' total budgets, suggesting that Directorates-Generals with a tradition of evaluating spending programmes also attach more importance to legislative evaluations.

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