Internal network structures as opportunity structures: control and effectiveness in the European competition network

ABSTRACT

European Administrative Networks (EANs) are well-studied platforms of collaboration between national authorities. To understand EANs, the literature typically relies on few explanatory variables: network origins, objectives, and outputs. This external view of EANs leaves important questions unanswered, notably concerning power redistribution and regulators’ perception of EANs. This article highlights the importance of network internal structures as an explanatory variable for understanding EANs. We contend that internal structures are ‘opportunity structures’ for regulators to set agendas and share resources. We investigate the case of the European Competition Network (ECN) – a highly structured, hierarchical and formalized enforcement network – drawing on structured interviews with 15 National Competition Agencies (NCAs) carried out in 2014. We find that the ECN’s formal internal structures afford all NCAs access to the agenda, foster perceptions of effectiveness, and promote informal sharing of expertise outside the network. Future research should incorporate internal structures into analyses of administrative networks.

KEYWORDS:

• Agenda-setting
• control
• effectiveness
• European Administrative Networks
• European competition network
• internal structures

Acknowledgements

We should like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editors for their constructive and insightful feedback. We should also like to express our gratitude to the officials in national competition authorities who generously took the time to share their expertise with us. Without them, this article would not have been possible. Finally, we wish to thank the organisers (Dorte Martinsen and Reini Schrama at the University of Copenhagen) and the participants of the session on European Administrative Networks held at the last EUSA Conference held in Denver (CO, USA) in May 2019 for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 References to legislation are included in the online supplementary material.

2 The number of cases was retrieved in October 2017 at the following link http://ec.europa.eu/competition/ecn/statistics.html. The ECN website did not provide disaggregated data on NCA cases by year. We transformed the count variable of cases into a categorical variable comprising four levels, to focus on the qualitative difference between more and less experienced NCAs (based on the number of cases they dealt with) and explain the direction of the ties in the network.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the support provided for the research by the Centre for Competition Policy at the University of East Anglia.

Notes on contributors

Francesca Pia Vantaggiato

Francesca Pia Vantaggiato is Lecturer in Public Policy at King’s College London, UK.

Hussein Kassim

Hussein Kassim is Professor of Politics at University of East Anglia, UK.

Kathryn Wright

Kathryn Wright is Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of York, UK.