Neither monist nor pluralist: EU elites as a triarchy

This contribution aims to map the profiles of the 290 leading political and administrative positions in the EU institutions one and a half years after the election (in the broadest sense) of the EU's 'top positions' following the 2019 European elections. The proposed angle of analysis differs from the state of the art by several original features. It is the first to picture the leadership positions of the institutional triangle as a whole. It investigates both political and administrative functions that are usually separated in the literature. It uses a vast spectrum of variables, including socio-biological properties (age, gender, nationality), dominant careers (private, administrative/political, EU/national/international), and training (discipline, national/European/international university, centre/periphery). At the crossroads of the sociology of elites and European integration studies, descriptive statistics and Multiple Correspondence Analysis break with the common wisdom about Eurocrats and show that neither monist nor pluralist: the top positions in the EU represent a triarchy that overlaps the institutional triangle.