How does expert knowledge travel between EU institutions? The case of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership

ABSTRACT

Expertise has been highlighted as a central source of power and legitimacy within the European Union system, and has been pointed to as one explanation of the relative influence of EU institutions in policy-making processes. This paper investigates such inter-institutional differences by asking: To what extent, and how, does expertise from the Commission influence the European Parliament’s positions? We explore this question by analysing the transfer of expertise from the Commission to the Parliament in the case of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Our analysis finds clear differences in what type of expert knowledge the EP incorporated– as well as how they use expertise. In the beginning of the period analysed, the Commission’s expert input is broadly used by the EP and largely unquestioned. Some years later, there is much less reference to external expert and Commission sources and the EP is also much more critical, and explicitly questions conclusions that was supported two years earlier. In our final discussion, we propose that this change over time might be due to the politicisation of TTIP, and discuss how and why this is the case.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• expertise
• European Commission
• European Parliament
• Trade

Notes

1 In this paper, the terms ‘expertise’ and ‘expert knowledge’ are used for all such input from recognised experts – both in-house and external.

2 The negotiations on TTIP have been on ice since Donald Trump became President of the US.

3 The group included the chair of INTA (who was also the rapporteur), shadow rapporteurs as well as chairs and rapporteurs of 14 other committees.

4 The software package Nvivo was used for the analysis. For more details on qualitative content analysis and comparison, see Bauer (2000).

5 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+CRE+20130522+ITEM-017+DOC+XML+V0//EN&language=EN.

6 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/unitedstates/en/eu-us-relations/ttip-transatlantic-trade-and-investment-partnership?webaction=view.acceptCookies, last accessed 11/12/2017.