This book offers insightful analyses of senior bureaucrats in the European Commission, which is one of the world's most powerful international bureaucracies and least transparent of the European Union's institutions. The authors demonstrate the relevance of general theories of bureaucratic behavior, and in doing so illustrate again that the EU is an excellent testing ground for theories from comparative politics. Their book will be of interest not only to Europeanists but also to comparativists whose main interests include bureaucracies in other political systems.
The authors formulate testable hypotheses about the conditions under which bureaucratic agents have most autonomy from their political masters (Chapter 2). Firstly, when political authority is fragmented, bureaucratic agents are said to have more autonomy. They argue that this is the case in the EU because Commission bureaucrats answer to a diffuse set of political masters: the College of Commissioners (somewhat similar to national ministers) at the apex of the Commission, the Council where member states are represented, and the European Parliament. While this is correct, bureaucrats in each Directorate General (DGs are the main organizational units in the Commission) are answerable to an individual Commissioner, usually an experienced national politician, who is responsible for the specific portfolio in question. The second theoretical proposition is that when bureaucratic agents have more political legitimacy, they have more autonomy. The authors argue that Commission bureaucrats have the potential for such legitimacy in terms of their legal status, which is enshrined in European treaties, their specialized technical expertise, and the specific functions they perform. The third proposition is that bureaucratic agents with a distinct organizational culture have more autonomy. The authors contend that while previous scholarship disputed the existence of a coherent culture in the Commission, there is potential for one, and part of their investigation is devoted to establishing whether it exists.
The empirical basis of the book consists of semistructured interviews with 194 senior Commission officials held in 2005 and 2006. Five chapters dissect the qualitative and quantitative information from these interviews and relevant secondary sources. In the chapter on bureaucrats' views on the autonomy of the Commission, we learn that most respondents (69%) believe that their DGs influence the College of Commissioners more than it influences them (p. 73). Another substantive chapter investigates whether bureaucrats perceive that there is a common culture across the Commission; 76% agreed or strongly agreed that there is. Other chapters focus on bureaucrats' views on a range of issues, including attempts to reform the Commission, the desirable level of integration, and public Euroskepticism.
Although the theoretical propositions are plausible, relevant theoretical models of delegation to bureaucratic agents suggest alternative mechanisms and relationships between key variables, and our knowledge of the causes of bureaucratic autonomy will develop by specifying and testing these alternatives more rigorously in the future. Consider the authors' proposition that fragmentation in political oversight leads to more bureaucratic autonomy. The commitment perspective on delegation, according to which politicians delegate to solve commitment problems, also suggests this proposition (e.g., David Epstein and Sharyn O'Halloran, Delegating Powers: A Transaction Cost Politics Approach to Policy Making Under Separate Powers, 1999; Giandomenico Majone, “Two Logics of Delegation: Agency and Fiduciary Relations in EU Governance,” European Union Politics 2 [2001]: 103–22). One such commitment problem occurs when politicians wish to commit themselves credibly to a decision outcome they did not fully support, which often happens in fragmented political systems such as the EU, in which political actors hold diverse policy preferences. By contrast, some transaction-costs models of delegation suggest the opposite relationship (e.g., Jon Bendor and Adam Meirowitz, “Spatial Models of Delegation,” American Political Science Review 98 [2004]: 293–310). Since politicians need to form coalitions to delegate to bureaucrats, they are less likely to grant autonomy in fragmented systems where coalitions are harder to form.
Another example concerns the authors' expectation that bureaucracies with a distinct and coherent culture have more bureaucratic autonomy. This also sounds plausible, and the commitment perspective on delegation leads to the same expectation. However, the opposite relationship is suggested by a transaction-costs model of delegation in the EU formulated by Fabio Franchino (The Powers of the Union: Delegation in the EU, 2007). According to his model, to the extent that the Commission holds policy preferences that are distinct from those of politicians, which is likely if the Commission has a distinct and coherent culture, it will be granted less autonomy, because politicians fear bureaucratic drift.
The interviewers obtained a wealth of quantitative and qualitative information from their respondents, at times coming close to asking respondents their research questions directly, rather than information on the basis of which they themselves could draw inferences. For instance, bureaucrats were asked directly whether they “influence the College” (p. 73) and whether “there is an esprit de corps or a common culture across DGs” (p. 131). Their answers are of interest but also raise further questions. Do the responses to the influence question imply that most bureaucrats believe that if the entire College and an entire DG took different policy positions on an issue that was of equal importance to both, then the College would lose? The authors give a sound scholarly definition of culture that refers to individuals' beliefs, values, and norms (p. 124). Arguably, respondents' reports on their own beliefs, values, and norms should form the main basis of researchers' assessments of whether a common culture exists, not respondents' views on the research question itself. While the bivariate quantitative analyses are accessible, future research might reexamine the data with multivariate statistics.
One of the main conclusions is that European officials believe that they are custodians who are “serving the future generations of Europeans” (p. 200), rather than today's elected politicians or citizens. The book does not report quantitative evidence on the proportion of respondents who say that they should serve future generations to a greater extent than today's do politicians and citizens. Rather, the conclusion is based on respondents' views on the causes of Euroskepticism (pp. 153–63) and the failed Constitutional Treaty (pp. 182–85), among other issues. Officials believe that the main causes of Euroskepticism are manipulation by national politicians and citizens' ignorance of the EU. While such diagnoses by officials may appear unreflective, they are perhaps more a statement of fact than an indication of arrogance. For instance, the most common reason given by no-voters themselves in the 2008 Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty was a lack of information and understanding.
Furthermore, the book's depiction of an arrogant bureaucracy contrasts with other depictions of the Commission as a highly consultative organization that seeks to legitimize its policy proposals by extensively engaging with relevant stakeholders (e.g., David Coen and Jeremy Richardson, eds., Lobbying the European Union: Institutions, Actors, and Issues, 2009). The closing paragraphs of the book speculate that following the current financial crisis, the Commission is likely to emerge more powerful than ever, and suggest this will be due to the efforts of unaccountable bureaucrats striving for deeper integration. It is certainly true that the Commission is gaining powers to monitor Eurozone members' compliance with fiscal rules. However, the commitment perspective on delegation offers an alternative explanation: Member states are granting this bureaucratic agent more clearly defined discretionary powers to solve one of the hardest commitment problems in Europe's recent history.
In summary, this book should be read if one cares about the bureaucratic structures that support the European Union, which is clearly the most extensive form of international cooperation in the world today, or bureaucratic behavior more generally. It is an example of modern political science that draws on theories of bureaucratic behavior from other political systems, and that examines an impressive data set consisting of detailed qualitative and quantitative information, which the authors painstakingly collected themselves. This book—and, in particular, the questions it raises regarding theory, research design, and interpretation—should be a point of reference for future research on both the Commission and other bureaucracies.
