The policy shaping influence of internal coordination mechanisms in the European Commission – An analysis of issue-specific strategies

Policy coordination processes within the European Commission, the European Union’s main policy-making bureaucracy, have been identified as key to understanding the shape of eventual Commission proposals. Far from a unitary actor, the Commission is composed of different Directorates General (DGs), which seek to incorporate their interests and policy beliefs into a final Commission proposal. Traditionally, the Commission has been characterized by horizontal fragmentation, with issue-specific siloes working alongside each other. Attempts to coordinate policy-making efforts across these siloes have been institutionalized in interservice consultations (ISCs). During ISCs, interested DGs can give input into drafts prepared by the lead DG on a certain file. As they conclude coordination processes at the bureaucratic level, ISCs are an important venue for resolving differences of opinion among DGs before the draft goes up to the more political level of Commissioners and their cabinets. Despite the importance of these coordination mechanisms, their impact on policy-making has received only little attention so far. In this paper, we study to what extent policy proposals change after their introduction into an ISC and what factors account for the size and types of change that can be observed. To this end, we analyse proposals for issue-specific strategies that were put forward by the Von der Leyen Commission between its start and December 2022. For these proposals, we identify the changes made after their submission to the ISC and link these to a number of background variables relating to characteristics of the documents and the policy-making processes, such as issue salience and the scope of EU competence. This allows us to gain more insight into the factors that shape the politics of policy-making within the European Commission.