EU Commission Cabinets Between Change and Continuity

Cabinets are a form of organizing the relationship between the political level of a government and its top administration. They are thus crucial transmission mechanisms between the world of politics and the world of policy expertise. This is also true for the European Commission where the cabinet system changed throughout the last two decades, as has the political and and organisational environment in which it operates. Using theories of institutional change, this paper analyses the role and the development of the Commission cabinets over the last decades. The empirical observations are based on documentary analysis, on staff survey data collected in three waves between 2008 and 2018 as well as more than 70 in-depth interviews with cabinet members from three different Commission. The determinants of continuity and change of the Commission cabinet system are identified and the conditions for apparent persistence and transformation of cabinet influence on policy-making are studied. The article concludes that Commission cabinets—despite a range of substantial changes concerning their composition rules and the organizational as well as institutional environment they operate in—still provide crucial policy steering in exactly the way they always have. However, the organizational transformation of the Commission towards a more presidential and a more coherently top-down managed apparatus diminished the strategic role of most cabinets in the system. A new cabinet hierarchy has emerged—from which mainly the president’s and the vice-presidents’ cabinets benefit.