The impact of external interaction on the governance beliefs of bureaucrats: a two-wave study of the European Commission

The European Commission is an international bureaucracy that relies on extensive consultations with a range of external actors and institutions in order to make policy. Individual civil servants maintain relationships with one or more external actors, which depend primarily on their role and tasks within the organisation. Recent research has shown that such routine interactions may affect Commission officials’ governance beliefs about the role of the organisation, suggesting that these beliefs are susceptible to change over time. In this paper, we test this implication by assessing whether Commission officials’ governance beliefs change as their patterns of relationships with external stakeholders change. We rely on statistical models of network change and original data from two waves of a survey among Commission officials in 2014 and 2018. The sample includes repeated observations of 893 respondents (679 remain active in the same DG, while 214 changed DG between survey waves).