Suchergebnisse

What kind of European Union do top Commission officials want? Should the European Union be supranational or intergovernmental? Should it promote market-liberalism or regulated capitalism? Should the Commission be Europe's government or its civil service? This 2002 book examines top officials' preferences on these questions through analysis of unique data from 137 interviews. Understanding the forces that shape human preferences is the subject of intense debate. Hooghe demonstrates that the Commission has difficulty shaping its employees' preferences in the fluid multi-institutional context of the European Union. Top officials' preferences are better explained by experiences outside rather than inside the Commission: political party, country, and prior work leave deeper imprints than directorate-general or cabinet. Preferences are also influenced more by internalized values than by self-interested career calculation. Hooghe's findings are surprising, and will challenge a number of common assumptions about the workings and motives of the European Commission

1\. Introduction 5 2\. Commission Officials and EU Governance 5 2.1 Explaining Beliefs on EU Governance 9 2.2 Beliefs about the Future 12 3\. Commission Officials and Politics 14 3.1 Understanding Ideological Variation in the Commission 15 3.2 The Meaning of the "Political" 18 4\. Commission Officials and Policy Scope 21 4.1 Centralization Across the Board? 22 4.2 Bureau- maximization? 24 5\. Conclusion 26 References 28 Appendix: Multivariate Analyses 31 ; What lives in the European Commission at the beginning of the 21st Century? This paper charts Commission officials' views on the governance, ideological direction, and policy scope of the European Union, employing data from a large survey conducted in Autumn 2008. First, the Commission is not a hothouse for supranationalism. True, supporters of a supranational Union with the College of Commissioners as the government of Europe and member states in the back seat are the largest minority, but they are outnumbered two-to-one by state- centric, pragmatist, and ambivalent officials. There are striking differences in distribution by nationality, gender, and department. Second, where do Commission officials stand on ideology? The answer is that the Commission is broadly representative of European societies, at least on traditional economic left/right issues, though decidedly more socio-liberal. Ideological views are not randomly distributed across services, with social DGs significantly more social-democratic than DGs handling market integration. Officials from new member states are more market-liberal than their 'western' colleagues. Finally, are Commission officials indeed bureau-maximizers? We find that, on the whole, Commission officials want more EU authority in the eleven policy areas that we asked them to evaluate, but their desire to centralize is selective and measured. It seems driven by functional imperatives – centralization where scale economies can be reaped – and by values and ideology rather than by a generalized preference for maximal Commission ...

How do Commission officials conceive the Commission's role in the European Union? Should the Commission be the government of Europe or the servant of Member States? Is there a third possibility -- that of institutional pragmatism, whereby Commission and Member States share authority? This article lays out jurisdictional options and role conceptions adopted by Commission officials, and estimates their relative incidence using a 2008 large-scale survey among Commission officials (N=1,901). There is a plurality of views, though within relatively narrow parameters. In explaining variation, national background shapes views more than professional background. Adapted from the source document.