Bureaucratic change in the European administrative space: The case of the European commission

Abstract

In this article, we compare bureaucratic change in the European Commission with developments in the public administrations of the member states of the European Union using two standard features of the study of comparative public administration: the degree of politicisation of the higher management and the degree of openness of the career system. The empirical data shows that the Commission started as a public administration in the Continental tradition and over time partially moved towards the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian models. At the same time, the majority of the member states remained rather stable with regard to their position along the two administrative dimensions under study. We argue that none of the mechanisms commonly invoked to explain organisational change–functional adaptation, path dependency, isomorphism or policy windows–can convincingly account for the complete pattern and the magnitude of change that we observe in the case of the European Commission. While we find no convincing support for the relevance of functional adaptation or path dependency, the concepts of isomorphism and policy windows provide a more promising basis for understanding at least some aspects of the empirical development.

Acknowledgement

An earlier version of this article was presented at the CONNEX Conference on ‘Institutional Dynamics and the Transformation of Executive Politics in Europe’, Barcelona, 7 to 9 June 2007. We are grateful to the participants of this conference and the anonymous referees of WEP for their valuable comments.

Notes

1. Although admittedly the definition of incremental change is ill-specified in the literature on institutional path dependency; it is obviously difficult to empirically falsify the concept.