Accounting for input in comitology committees: an uncomfortable silence

Abstract

This article analyses to what extent comitology is an accountable form of governance. Past research related to this question exclusively focused on the formal arrangements between European institutions and the comitology committees, and showed that accountability is on the increase but still quite poorly developed. However, it took no notice of an equally important set of actors: the superiors of the committee participants working in national ministries. This article uses new survey and interview data collected among Dutch and Danish superiors of committee participants. It shows that superiors are generally able to sanction or reward the behaviour of their subordinates, but they do not actively process information and they do not often discuss the input of the committee participants. This article concludes that accountability for this multilevel governance setting is lost somewhere between the European and national levels.

Keywords:

• Accountability
• comitology
• legitimacy
• member states
• multilevel governance

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research for this article was funded by a grant from NWO (the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research), registered under no. 450-04-319.

Notes

Figures based on the year 2008 (European Commission 2009), only counting those committees that physically meet or deliver opinions.

Found by counting how many times an opinion of a comitology committee was referred to under ‘whereas’ in all Commission acts adopted from 2004 through 2008 (dataset compiled from EUR-LEX by Dimiter Toshkov, Leiden University).

Under co-decision, the European Parliament also has a say about the installment of a comitology committee.

See the internet-based comitology register, available online at http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regcomitology/index_en.htm

See Bradley (2008) and the interinstitutional agreement between Commission and Parliament on procedures for implementing Council Decision 1999/468/EC, OJ 2000 L 256/19.

Computed as (153/(2∗225)).

All answers were given in the form of five-point scales ranging from ‘very often (1)’ to ‘never (5)’.

Chronbach's Alpha: 0.59.

Great care was taken to prime the respondents to situations following agency behaviour. The three questions preceding the list of sanctions were about information practices and debates after committee meetings, and the wording of the question itself was: ‘How often do you use the following means to let your staff know you are very pleased or dissatisfied with their work?’ The options were derived from the principal–agent literature and from a set of exploratory interviews held with three superiors in advance of sending out the survey.