Who commissioners meet: Analysing external meetings in the European Commission

This study addresses a gap in our understanding of how individual European Commission members allocate their limited attention by introducing a new dataset of external, scheduled meetings recorded in Commissioners’ public calendars. Using comprehensive calendar data for 2010, 2015 and 2020, the paper maps meeting patterns over time and across Commission hierarchy to shed light on debates about Commissioners’ loyalties (national versus supranational) and the Commission’s transformation from a technocratic body toward a more political actor. The initial analysis shows that the total number of registered external meetings rose between 2010 and 2020, consistent with the Commission’s increasing emphasis on openness and transparency. Institutional stakeholders constitute the single largest category of external interlocutors, and the data also reveal a moderate national bias. At the same time, frequent contacts with other EU actors – especially Members of the European Parliament – point to the Commission’s supranational orientation and the continuing parliamentarisation of the EU system. These findings provide new empirical traction for debates about Commissioners’ attachments and the evolving political character of the Commission, substantiating the ambition of the paper, which is to offer a dataset and an analytic framework for future research on elite behaviour in the EU.