Under Pressure! How Politicisation Affects Senior Commission Officials

The European Commission is a highly unusual bureaucracy. Firstly, the Commission is a heterogeneous bureaucracy as it brings together administrators with very diverse, national, backgrounds. Liesbet Hooghe (2012) has captured this variance by distinguishing four types of Commission officials who have different conceptions of their institution’s role: Supranationalists, State centrics, Institutional pragmatists, and Fence sitters. Secondly, the character of the Commission remains ambivalent. On the one hand, it constitutes a technocratic and independent bureaucracy safeguarding the ‘general interest’ of the European Union (EU). On the other hand, its independent position becomes increasingly pressured by the ongoing politicization of the EU. European decision-rules and objectives have become more contested due to their increasing jurisdictional scope, the visibility of national political parties propagating ‘less Brussels’, and the growing EU skepticism among the general public. These developments make Commission officials more vulnerable to the whims of national political and public opinion. This paper seeks to assess how senior Commission officials have reacted to the politicization of the EU by investigating how they conceive of their institution’s role throughout time and across policy fields. The analysis draws on three waves of surveys and interviews conducted in 1996 and 2002 (by Hooghe (2002, 2005), and 2008 (by Kassim et al., forthcoming) tapping senior officials’ role conceptions. Variations in exposure to politicization over time and by policy field and nationality are measured on the basis of a content analysis of the three largest newspapers in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, over the period 1996 to 2008. Linking these two data sources allows us to determine whether, and when, the politicization has led senior Commission officials to change their roles and which among them have been most susceptible to this.