The European Commission

Abstract

The responsiveness of the European Commission is both empirically and normatively contested. To what extent, and to which interests is the Commission responsive, and what are the normative implications of this responsiveness? Some conceptualise the Commission as a rather unresponsive technocratic body that merely executes governmental preferences, while others see it as the voice of interests striving for more integration. In some accounts, the Commission’s responsiveness to external pressure weakens its problem solving capacity. There is ample evidence that decision-making inside the Commission is far from insulated. The Commission’s attempts to be responsive are invariably linked to a normative quest for greater legitimacy, the need to uphold decision-taking capacity or to much warranted improvements of implementation deficits. However, we still lack systematic knowledge regarding the extent to which the Commission can and wants to respond to the policy demands of other institutions and external actors, how this differs between the Commission’s core functions of agenda setting and guarding the treaty, as well as on the theoretical implications this has for our understanding of the Commission as an institutional actor. Against these overarching issues the panel welcomes papers that address one or more of the following key questions: How can we measure the responsiveness of the Commission? What differences exist in the responsiveness of the Commission over time and between policy areas, and why? What motives the Commission when responding to the demands of external actors such as organised interest groups, expert networks, civil society organizations and the broader public? What theoretical advances have been made that help us link responsiveness to policy outcomes and institutional arrangements in the Commission? We invite theoretically informed papers that address one or more of these questions from a diverse range of research approaches.

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