Revised Coordination within the European Commission: Breaking up Policy Silos or Building New Bottlenecks?

Since the European Commission, as the EU’s core administrative steering body, has traditionally been characterised by siloed structures, with Commissioners and Directorates-General operating within narrowly defined policy portfolios, recent organisational reforms and adaptations have challenged the idea of a highly fragmented organisation. In light of the current challenges in effective EU policy-making in uncertain times and external pressures, building on the debate surrounding the Commission’s presidentialisation and shifts in internal coordination over time, the paper addresses the question of whether the recent organisational adaptations in the second von der Leyen Commission—e.g., the stronger role for Executive Vice-Presidents or the intensified use of project groups—have fostered more cross-cutting policy-making or have ended up in a more complex and burdensome organisational coordination setting that rather hampers innovative, cross-silo policy-making. Methodologically, in a first step, the paper maps and analyses organisational adaptations over time, beginning with the first Barroso Commission. Thus, building on official Commission documents, such as Mission Letters, the Rules of Procedure, and other relevant internal guidelines, the analysis traces the Commission’s organisational adaptations and different organisational patterns over the last 20 years. Contrasted with an initial set of empirical indicators on the application of the adapted coordination settings of the second von der Leyen Commission and particularly based on survey data from Commission civil servants, a second stage of analysis focuses more in-depth on the practical effects of recent organisational adaptations and developments under the current von der Leyen presidency on innovative and cross-cutting policy-making in the European Commission. We conclude by assessing the recent organisational changes, internal leadership dynamics, and consolidations of cross-cutting governance arrangements within the Commission, in comparison to prior presidencies.