When Do National Administrative Representatives Engage in the EU’s Multi-Level Administration? Evidence from Small Member States’ Representatives in EU Agencies

National agency representatives are omnipresent in EU agencies: They provide information; they contribute in working groups to EU agencies’ output; and they have a large majority of votes in the agencies’ decision-making bodies. Nonetheless, research indicates that it is predominantly the Commission that pro-actively shapes EU agencies’ work and agendas. Most of the time, national representatives behave passively. There is thus a debate whether despite their intergovernmental control structure, EU agencies are rather supranational bodies. For national representatives, influencing a decision in this networked, multi-level administrative setting is costly. Forging agreement among the (qualified) majority of member states is time-consuming, especially for representatives whose prime affiliation is their home agency and who face resource constraints. This paper explores when representatives of national administrations nonetheless engage pro-actively in coordination within EU agencies. Under resource constraints, national officials have to prioritize between their national tasks and representing their agency within EU agencies’ working groups and networks. The paper investigates when national representatives defend member state interests, their institutional interest or a substantial regulatory outlook. As possible influencing conditions, the paper analyses the role of EU agencies’ competences and structures, national representatives institutional background and the salience of the agency’s policy field for the member state on which interest is primarily pursued by national representatives. The paper aims to identify when these configuration encourage national representatives to pro-actively shape EU agencies’ agendas and decisions. To do so, the paper compares the behaviour of national representatives from three small EU member states (Malta, Luxembourg and Slovenia) in a set of four EU agencies (the European Environment Agency, the European Medicines Agency, the European Maritime Agency and the European Banking Authority). Representatives from these states face resource constraints. Thus, they have to remain passive or even absent in some EU agency meetings. In other words, they have to prioritise where to engage. This prioritisations of activities in EU agencies, measured via minutes, documents and interviews, reveals under which configurations national representatives pro-actively represent their government’s, their own institutional or substantial preferences despite the strain on their limited resources. Furthermore, the representatives of these countries randomly stem from ministries and independent government agencies. The selected EU agencies cover in a diverse case selection design the different EU agency types (information-gathering, authorising, harmonising and regulatory) and their policy fields are of different salience for the three selected countries. Through this the paper develops typical settings when national representatives try to influence multi-level administrative agendas and decisions in their institutional, member states’ or substantive interest. This contributes to our knowledge about the nature of EU agencies and more generally to the drivers behind bureaucratic behaviour in the EU’s multi-level administrative system.