Understanding supranational executive's behaviour: Mapping the calendars of EU commissioners

What characterises the behaviour of supranational executive heads and how can we account for recurrent patterns? This study outlines a new database that enables longitudinal studies encompassing all external, registered meetings of all college members of the Commission. The database is used to revisit long-lasting discussions in the study of the EU executive: whether commissioners are driven primarily by supranational, sectoral, national and/or partisan interests, but also whether we see signs of increasing politicization. This paper represents a first attempt at using the database to map the meetings of commissioners. The paper compares meetings drawn from 2010, 2015, and 2020 – covering the second year of three different Commissions – Barroso II, Juncker and von der Leyen. The first part of the paper theorizes the behaviour of commissioners and reviews extant literature. The second part outlines the data and methods and presents key results. The data describes meeting patterns over time and across policy areas. Furthermore, we examine meeting patterns of the President and the Vice-Presidents to gauge how the goal of multidimensional policies is reflected in their calendars.