European Agencies Independence and Influence in Comparison – Towards a More Comprehensive Picture

In the third wave of European agencification, extremely independent and powerful regulatory agencies have been created. Some of them are formal agenda-setters in several decision-making procedures, meaning that the European Commission is hardly allowed to deviate from the agencies’ recommendations but instead has to send a proposal back to the agency for revision if the Commission is not satisfied by it. As recent empirical research demonstrates, the role as formal agenda-setters gives them overwhelming influence in policy-making on the Comitology level. However, there is a price to pay for this influence as the Commission intervenes highly in those agencies’ day-to-day decisionmaking, thereby lowering their de facto independence. Whereas earlier research compared only three regulatory agencies (EMA, ESMA and ACER) this paper broadens the empirical focus to six influential European agencies, testing whether this trade-off is a generalizable pattern or whether other agencies are able to maintain high influence and independence at the same time. It investigates the influence of several variables known from agency autonomy research on this trade-off, in particular the amount of expertise necessary to fulfill the task, age and size. As a result it will answer the question, whether there is a clear pattern in European agencies influence and independence, having far-reaching consequences for agency design and reform in the future.