The Power of Expertise: Assessing the Influence of Technocrats in Intergovernmental Euro Crisis Negotiations

A well-established narrative about the European Union (EU) and especially about the Eurozone is that these are “technocratic” regimes—namely systems dominated by unelected experts at the expense of democratic processes. The narrative has gained force during the euro crisis, the responses to which—both policy and institutional—are often depicted, above all by populists, as entailing the usurpation of member states’ power and autonomy on the part of rule-obsessed Brussels technocrats. Yet to a large extent the idea of a technocratic EU remains as elusive and contested as it is widespread. Partly, this is due to the sequential manner in which the technocratic level connects to the political one within policy-making processes. Usually, technocrats are either implementers of decisions made, formally speaking, by politicians, or advisers to the latter. In both cases, the relationship between the two spheres makes it difficult to draw the line between politicians and technocrats—put differently, to discern where political influence ends and technocratic one begins. An exception to the foregoing setup are bargaining situations between technocratic and political actors, in which the encounter between the two is equal and simultaneous, thus allowing a clearer detection of technocratic influence vis-à-vis politicians by examining bargaining processes and especially outcomes. Building on these premises, this paper tests the “EU-as-technocracy” hypothesis by assessing the performance of supranational technocratic bodies in intergovernmental negotiations during the euro crisis. By using original data from the “EMU Choices” project, we conduct statistical analyses to gauge the influence of both the European Central Bank (a fully technocratic body) and the European Commission (a semi-technocratic body) on the outcome of 47 negotiations with member states. Our analyses show that while the Commission’s negotiating position is significantly correlated with final bargaining outcomes, a similar correlation does not exist for the ECB. That the ECB—one the most powerful EU institutions—does not seem to have much power in intergovernmental negotiations contradicts the widespread depiction of the EU/Eurozone as a technocratic regime. Moreover, our results suggest that the influence carried by the Commission is due less to its technocratic aspects than with its political role, and more precisely its ability to set the negotiating agenda and/or to accommodate the prevailing position of member states. The paper sheds new light not only on the EU’s crisis policies, but also on the more general dynamics governing intergovernmental negotiations, and the relationships between technocracy and politics within the Union.