Do EU Watchdogs Bark Louder in Times of Crisis? How the European Court Auditors and the European Ombudsman Held the European Commission to Account During the Covid-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic added to the sequence of crises that have compelled the European Union (EU) to operate in a near-permanent emergency mode, raising renewed concerns about its democratic legitimacy. This paper examines how two specialized oversight institutions (or “watchdogs”) – the European Court of Auditors (ECA) and the European Ombudsman (EO) – fulfilled their scrutiny functions vis-à-vis the European Commission, the EU’s core executive, during the pandemic. It asks whether and how these watchdogs adapted their usual operations to the complexity of the crisis context, and with what effects. Conceptually, the paper draws on bureaucratic reputation theory (Carpenter 2001, 2010, Carpenter and Krause 2012), which suggests that, as specialized “institutions of accountability” (Mulgan 2000), both the ECA and the EO direct their reputation management efforts toward building distinct “niche” profiles as diligent account-holders. In this sense, the COVID-19 crisis provided a highly visible and salient opportunity for such actors to demonstrate their capacity to ‘demand accountability’. Empirically, the paper relies on documentary analysis of audit reports, opinions, strategic and complaint-based inquiries, and public communications issued by the ECA and EO between 2020 and 2023. The findings indicate that while both watchdogs entered a form of “crisis mode” during the pandemic, they adopted different approaches in terms of the speed of their responses, the balance between proactive and reactive strategies, and the use of scrutiny versus advisory instruments within their respective toolkits.