Mapping the European administrative space: EU Agencies‘ Formal Independence over Time

Independent EU agencies are frequently used to respond to EU policy crises and implementation challenges, recently for example to respond to the financial crisis (by the foundation of the ESAs) and the migration crisis (by expanding the tasks and resources of FRONTEX). However, during the Juncker Commission, European legislators replaced the founding regulation of more than half of all EU agencies to combat the often criticised disparate and idiosyncratic nature of EU agencies. Arguably, these institutional harmonization reforms influence EU agencies’ capacities but also their formal independence from other EU institutions to different degrees. This raises the question of how EU agencies’ independence as their raison d ’être develops over time and why some EU agencies become more independent than others. Existing studies on EU agencies independence imply a constant tension between functional reasons for the creation of EU agencies and the politics of institutional choice: EU agencies shall solve policy problems through their (scientific and regulatory) independence but remain closely embedded in the EU’s institutional system. Our paper addresses how this tension played out in the delegation processes of the last decade and the institutional expansion of existing agencies. We compile an updated dataset with the existing measures of EU agencies’ independence. It cover the entire EU agencies’ landscape – with some of the most powerful agencies only created in recent years – but also tracks the development of formal independence over time through amendments and regulatory overhauls. On this novel data, we can both update our explanations of competence delegations to EU agencies and create insights in the interaction of the formal politics of institutional choice and functional pressures in the post-delegation phase.