How time empowers agency: combining the EU Commission’s political powers and its administration’s advantage of acting from a long-term perspective

Abstract

Politics in time has recently gained in scholarly attention, particularly in the area of EU studies. This article adds to this literature by arguing that differences in administrative and political actors’ time horizon are particularly pronounced in the EU multilevel system and showing how this can be used strategically by actors. This matters because unlike national administrations with long-term perspectives, the EU Commission is endowed with powers in policy-making. This combination allows it to turn time into power by opting for strategies that yield benefits after a couple of years. The argument is illustrated with two long-term strategies employed by the Commission in controversial EU equal treatment policy-making.

Keywords:

• European Commission
• administration
• time
• anti-discrimination
• political power

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge funding from the VW Foundation. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at a workshop at Temple University in Philadelphia (April 2012), at the Free University Berlin (November 2013) and Technical University Darmstadt (June 2014). My thanks go to the participants for discussions and helpful comments, and particularly to Martin Höpner, Klaus Götz, Julia Metz, Mark Pollack, Sebastiaan Princen and Kai Schulze. I also wish to thank anonymous reviewers for highly valuable comments. I am grateful to all interview partners who freely gave of their time and to Julia Feldkötter and Yann Lorenz for research assistance.

Notes

1. The terms EU anti-discrimination and EU equal treatment policies are used interchangeably throughout the article.

2. Of course strategies may also hold negative payoffs, but a rational actor will not seek these.

3. Although institutionally distinct, I abstained from differentiating between the Council of Ministers and the Council of the European Union here, since both hold similar time horizons.

4. Often, the issues dominating the respective presidencies are subject to political timing at the national level (e.g. Johansson, Langdal, and von Sydow 2012).

5. They do change positions in the Commission, but our database shows that turnover is much lower than for Commissioners. Cf. database on the European Commission: http://www.wzb.eu/de/forschung/internationale-politik-und-recht/positionsbildung-in-der-eu-kommission/publikationen/database

6. This picture holds if we look at the three terms of particular interest in this paper (cf. WZB database, cf. footnote 5).

7. We matched individual MEPs for the 5./6. as well as for the 6./7. election period to calculate the number and percentage of newly elected members (source: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/de/search.html).

8. I thank Holger Döring for sharing data and insights of the ParlGov database (http://wiki.parlgov.org). Following the coding applied in the database for cabinets, changes are ‘any change in the set of parties holding cabinet membership, any change in the identity of the prime minister, any general election or any substantively meaningful resignation’. Using a different data-set and focusing on three distinct measures of turnover Scherpereel and Perez (2014, 13) find even higher instability of only 7% ministers ‘surviving’ the 2000-4 term and 5% the 2004–2012 period.

9. In order to preserve anonymity, I refer to these interviews as ‘COM1’, ‘NGO2’, etc., in combination with the year in which they were conducted.

10. Examples are the failure of social partner consultations on sexual harassment or the critical stance of FERPA, the trade union representing older workers, on opposing age discrimination in employment (Bell 2002, 394; Hartlapp 2007).