Expertisation of the EU Commission’s Expert Groups?

The EU Commission’s expert group system is one of the main loci of decision-making ‘behind closed doors’ within EU governance, an arena where experts shape political choices on the grounds of their superior epistemic authority. The Commission’s expert groups have traditionally been composed of experts in three roles: member states’ representatives, stakeholders and independent academics. With the advent of increasing pressures to base political decisions on evidence and scientific knowledge, the rise of academics and their methods in such arenas is often assumed, but rarely tracked over time in empirical terms. We zoom in on one particular aspect of the expert group system – the type of groups that runs under the label ‘high level group’(HLG) and ask: do we see an increasing participation and authority of academics and their epistemic procedures? With new data we analyse whether and how alleged ‘expertisation’ pressures are translated into 1) actual patterns of participation, 2) practises of committee-internal analysis and 3) modes of committee governance, and how this has changed over time. We draw on a data set that overs HLGs at three points in time - 2007, 2012 and 2017 – with respect to characteristics of the HLGs’ participants, mandates and output. We examine one particular shading of the expertisation claim: If expertisation pressures take the form of an ‘academisation’, we expect a situation where high level groups increasingly include academic elites – and thus crowd out other types of participants. Along these lines, the output of such groups would more and more adhere to epistemic practices drawn from academia, especially in terms of referencing practices, while the tasks of committees can be expected to be framed in a more technical than political manner. The background of experts has serious implications for the democratic legitimacy of an advisory system. If academics are indeed taking over, normative concerns about the legitimacy of the EU’s advisory system, which have so far largely centred on the issues of lobbyism and the balanced representation of interests, need to address the problem of an ‘epistocracy’.