The quiet transformation of the EU Commission cabinet system

ABSTRACT

Although cabinets in the European Commission have attracted considerable interest, scholarly attention has mainly focused on their composition and influence. How the status of cabinets or the relations between them have changed over time, and how cabinets have been affected by changes to the wider institutional environment, has gone largely unexamined. This article takes a step towards filling that gap. It argues that, despite apparent stability in the functions that cabinets perform, the cabinet system has undergone a quiet transformation. A new differentiation has created hierarchical relations within the cabinet system, with implications for policy coordination and output. Using historical institutionalist theory, the article shows that Commission cabinets have been affected less by reforms addressed directly at them and more by internal rule change aimed at other parts of their institutional environment.

KEYWORDS:

• European Commission
• cabinets
• gradual institutional change
• historical institutionalism
• presidentialization

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank three anonymous referees for valuable comments as well as Jeremy Richardson and Berthold Rittberger for their input and encouragement.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Historical institutionalism and its concepts of gradual institutional transformation were developed within comparative politics and used to explain stasis and change in macro-level institutions regulating relations between the state and the economy (Thelen, 1999; Immergut, 2006), but have also left their imprint on EU studies (Bulmer, 1993; Lindner & Rittberger, 2003; Christiansen & Verdun, 2020, for an overview) and the study of (international) organizations (Fioretos, 2011; Hanrieder, 2014; Greenwood et al., 2017). Scholars have used historical institutionalism to explain changing structures within national political institutions including the British House of Lords or the US Congress (Norton, 2001; Sheingate, 2010) and structural change in public administrations (Kickert & Van Der Meer, 2011). It is on the intersection of these literatures that the analysis of the transformation of the Commission’s cabinet system as an internal organizational feature of the EU’s executive is situated (Ongaro, 2013).

2 The empirical analysis is based on 38 long interviews conducted with cabinet staff. The interview templates are found in part B of the online annex. The interview code identifies the position held by the interviewee and the date when the interview was conducted: ‘HOC’ refers to head or deputy head of cabinet, and ‘MOC’ for members of cabinet. The digit following ‘HOC’ or ‘MOC’ gives the order in which holders of the post were interviewed that day. Thus, ‘HOC01_21092018’ is the first head of cabinet interviewed on 21 September 2018. All interviews were professionally transcribed.

3 As part of the 2014 reform of external communications, the communication adviser in each cabinet can now only be selected from the staff of the Spokesperson’s Service, thereby extending central control over Commission interaction with the press at political level.

4 Indeed, the strengthening of the presidency under the treaty has been limited in nature and has taken place stepwise constituting precisely the kind of configuration of functional pressures and institutional stickiness in which rule change below constitutional thresholds emerges incrementally and endogenously rather than in major leaps forward imposed by outside principals (Hanrieder, 2014). In this sense changes in the Commission’s cabinet system have intensified presidentialisation, and are also the result of an ongoing power struggle between president and commissioners over the last say in political leadership within the Commission (Tömmel, 2020). As regards the incremental character of change, Wille (2013, p. 200), describes presidentialisation within the Commission as a ‘slow-motion transformation’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael W. Bauer

Michael W. Bauer holds the chair of Public Administration at the School of Transnational Governance of the European University Institute, Florence.

Hussein Kassim

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

Sara Connolly

Sara Connolly is Professor of Personnel Economics at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.