Following the Crowd or Developing a Thicker Skin? Assessing the Impact of Politicisation on the Attitudes of Commission Officials

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).