European Commissioners: Committed Europeans or Member State Agents?

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Torsten Jörg Selck
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2015 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 288228997

This project aims at answering the question under what circumstances members of the European Commission, i.e. European Commissioners, act rather as committed Europeans or as agents of their member states' governments. As executives of the EU polity, Commissioners exert significant political influence. At the beginning of their term they swear to '(...) be completely independent in carrying out (...) responsibilities, in the general interest of the Union [and] in the performance of (...) tasks, neither to seek nor to take instructions from any Government (...).' It has repeatedly been doubted whether this oath is respected in practice. The core problem is the Commissioners' appointment mechanism. They are de facto appointed by the member states' governments, and proposed candidates are rarely refused. Based on principal-agent theory, we argue that Commissioners hereby become 'agents' of their member state governments. Academic research has previously been aware of the issue this project will address. But empirical accounts of the competing claims are difficult to produce, since the Commission is rather opaque in its dealings and interviews with high-ranking politicians in order to uncover political allegiances are rather exceptional. Therefore, questions regarding individual Commissioners' day-to-day workings have not yet conclusively been answered. Nevertheless, there are some important contributions. It has been shown that Commissioners do have different understandings of their roles. The next step is to show under what circumstances different roles are incorporated. The core hypothesis of this project is that the closeness of a Commissioner to her member state's government leads to agent-oriented behaviour on the side of the Commissioner. Other independent variables to be considered are the member state size, time spent in the Commission, the Commissioner's age, origin, and party family. This project's main challenge is operationalizing the dependent variable. This project proposes modern methods of quantitative text analysis to do so. Commissioners' speeches provide a rich source to be analysed with methods treating words as data. Different possibilities to do so will lead to interesting results. The combination of a new source in EU research and a so far unanswered research question is a significant contribution to research on the European Commission.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants