This paper investigates how Commission officials’ attitudes are affected by the politicization of the European Union. Building on an open system perspective on organizations, I develop a model of ‘Commission politicization’ that theorizes how national cultural characteristics (from the World/European Value Survey) mediate the impact of politicization – susceptibility and direction – on Commission officials’ attitudes. The paper introduces a new measure of politicization that is sensitive to country variation, and examines the theoretical conjectures in two sets of tests: a) an analysis for Commission officials of all ranks and nationalities for 2008 using a large-scale survey of Commission officials’ attitudes; and b) a TSCS analysis for senior Commission officials from Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom for three time points (1995-1997, 2002, 2008).
