Merit-Based Recruitment Boosts Good Governance: How Do European Union Agencies Recruit Their Personnel? A Research Note

It has been shown that public administrations that practice merit-based recruitment of their personnel are significantly less marked by corruption than administrations that do not recruit in this manner (Dahlström et al. 2012). While we know a lot about how EU member states score with regard to the degree of merit-based recruitment within their administrations (Dahlström et al. 2015; Kopecky et al. 2012), and also how the European Commission administration performs in this respect (Balint et al. 2008; Fusacchia 2009), recruitment practices within the increasing number of EU regulatory (decentralized) agencies seem to remain a white spot in the literature so far (Busuioc et al. 2012; Egeberg and Trondal 2016). In this paper, we intend to make a first step in mapping recruitment practices within the secretariats of such agencies, and also to shed light on how we can understand possible variation among agencies in such practices. For example, does it matter whether an EU agency is located in a country marked by a non-meritocratic administrative culture or not?