Oil in the Wheels of the Executive Order? A New Look at the Secondment of National Officials to EU Institutions

This paper studies the patterns of secondments of national officials to EU institutions. It takes a fresh look on these seconded national experts (SNEs) that are mostly examined in qualitative case studies or quantitative analyses of survey data studying SNEs' attitudes and their implications. This paper applies a novel perspective by emphasising the 'seconding patterns' of member state administrations. It examines the number of seconded officials across portfolios, receiving EU institutions, and over time. We perform a time-series cross-sectional analysis in order to analyse the determinants for these secondment patterns, including institutionalist features (being a EU member or an EFTA member only; years of membership, years of EU presidency), party-political determinants (the ideological composition and tenure of governments), attributes of the 'sending portfolios' (their salience, their degree of communitarisation, and differences between national ministries and agencies), and the characteristics of the 'receiving EU institutions' (e.g. with regard to competencies and size). Empirically, we analyse a new dataset on secondments of national officials from Germany and Norway, thereby selecting critical cases that, at the same time, differ with regard to their administrative traditions and key features of their national civil service. The empirical analysis reveals differences of secondment patterns that are arguably driven by institutionalist, partisan, sectoral, and organisational determinants. Moreover, these secondment patterns across countries and over time shed light into the strategic considerations of national administrations to place a certain amount of officials into distinct portfolios at EU level.