Inside the EU Commission: Understanding Interdepartmental Coordination of Policy Formulation

When preparing policy initiatives the EU Commission faces a challenge well-known from national government systems: How to strike a balance between specialization and coordination? (Gulick 1937; Hammond 2007; Wilson 1989; Guy Peters 2015; Scharpf 1994; Christensen & Lægreid 2008; Lægreid et al. 2014). To meet this challenge the Commission is organized into a set of Directorates-General (DGs), just like national governments are organized into a number of ministries. However, like national government systems, this organization only provides a partial answer; cooperation across DGs is also necessary. So, hierarchical coordination inside each DG needs to be supplemented with negotiated horizontal coordination across DGs. Despite important recent studies of the Commission’s internal workings (Kassim et al. 2013; Hartlapp et al. 2014; Wille 2013), we still know very little about how interdepartmental coordination functions inside the Commission. Building on reputation theory (Carpenter 2001; 2010) and based on data from the Commission’s internal digital coordination system, CIS-net, this paper seeks to explain coordination in the EU Commission by linking it to the saliency of the policy initiatives and to the Commission’s external institutional vulnerability. The data include all policy initiatives undertaken by the Commission over the years 2012-15: All draft secondary rules (directives, regulations, decisions), all draft tertiary rules (implementing acts, delegated acts), and all draft soft law initiatives (programs, communications, action plans, recommendations, etc.) – a total of approx. 28,000 cases.