National Administrative Representatives' Engagement in EU Agencies

National administrative representatives hold the majority in EU agencies’ decision-making bodies. But coordinating an agreement among the (qualified) majority of member states in this networked, multi-level setting is time-consuming, especially for representatives whose prime tasks lie in their domestic administrations. Thus, national representatives often act passively while Commission representatives pro-actively shape EU agencies’ work and agendas. This raises questions about who controls EU agencies’ decision-making. This paper contributes to this debate by exploring when representatives of national administrations engage pro-actively in coordination and decision-making within EU agencies. Due to resource constraints, national officials need to prioritize between national tasks and work within EU agencies. The paper investigates when national representatives pro-actively engage in EU-level activities touching upon their member state’s interests, their institutional interest or their substantial regulatory outlook. It aims to identify when EU agencies’ competences and the agencies’ salience encourage national representatives to pro-actively shape and contribute to 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 diverse set of four EU agencies (namely the European Environment Agency, the European Medicines Agency, the European Maritime Safety Agency and the European Banking Authority). This most different case selection covers the different EU agency types (information-gathering, authorising, harmonising and regulating) whose policy fields are of different salience to the three selected countries. Due to the size of their administrations national representatives must prioritise whether they engage, just participate or even remain absent in EU agency meetings. Their activity prioritisation in EU agencies is measured via minutes, documents and 30 semi-structured interviews. The preliminary results illustrate how under the absence of political priorities, administrative representatives in practice pro-actively engage to create linkages with their domestic work, thereby either improving its quality or easing implementation. Through this, the paper generates hypotheses for further testing on the reasons national representatives, who are both crucial decision-makers in EU agencies as well as their prime coordination targets, prioritise some EU agency tasks in their engagement and position formulation over others. This contributes to our knowledge about decision-making in EU agencies and more generally to the drivers behind bureaucratic behaviour in the EU’s multi-level administrative systems.