Who consults? The configuration of expert groups in the European union

Abstract

This article examines and explains the committee system of the EU as a crucial property of the EU governance system using a database on the European Commission's experts groups. What is the extent of the expert consultative system? What is the distribution of expert groups? Are these groups best understood as loose networks or do they constitute a stable, well-established consultative system? We observe a proliferation of expert groups over time and across sectors. They have become permanent properties of the EU governance system; yet they are remarkably unevenly distributed among different policy domains. Sectoral differentiation is accentuated by weak horizontal coordination between the Directorates-General. We argue that this heterogeneity is not only a result of deliberate design attempts and differences in policy tasks, but also the result of differences in legal and administrative capabilities, as well as the gradual development of different routines and norms among the DGs.

Acknowledgements

Draft versions of this article were presented at the ARENA seminar on 8 May 2007, at the CONNEX Conference: Institutional Dynamics and the Transformation of Executive Politics in Europe, Barcelona 7–9 June 2007, and at the 4th ECPR general conference, Pisa, Italy, 6–8 September 2007. We would like to thank Michael Bauer, Jeff Checkel, Thomas Christiansen, Pieter de Wilde, Morten Egeberg, Fabio Franchino and Johan P. Olsen for helpful comments.

Notes

1. Note that these studies focus specifically on comitology committees.

2. To our knowledge, the most comprehensive overview to date is provided by a Swedish governmental report prepared by Torbjörn Larsson (2003).

3. See Christiansen and Larsson (2007) for a discussion of the defining characteristics of the Commission's expert advisory groups.

4. Consultation, the European Commission and Civil Society (Coneccs) is the Commission's database of civil society organisations active at the EU level. http://ec.europa.eu/civil_society/coneccs/index.html.

5. For reasons of simplicity we use here the terms found in the unratified Draft Constitutional Treaty.

6. It does not cover all expert groups and committees that are linked to the Commission. The following broad categories of entities are excluded from the Commission's register and thus also from our database: 1) independent experts charged with assisting the Commission in the implementation of framework programmes for research and development; 2) Sectoral and cross-industry social dialogue committees, whose work is particularly aimed at the finalising of agreements implemented by the Council or autonomous agreements implemented by the social partners themselves and at adopting frameworks for action. There were about 70 such committees in 2004; 3) Comitology committees which are established by the legislator to assist the Commission in policy areas where the Commission is empowered to implement legislation (about 250 such committees in 2004); 4) Joint entities arising from international agreements (a total of 170 joint entities in 2004). These entities differ from expert groups in terms of their creation and competence: they are created in accordance with methods laid down in international agreements, and their role is to supervise their implementation: http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regexpert/faq/faq.cfm?aide=2.

7. See full agreement at http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/secretariat_general/relations/relations_other/docs/framework_agreement_ep-ec_en.pdf.

8. Data on the European Commission was found in the Statistical Bulletin of Commission staff: http://ec.europa.eu/civil_service/docs/bs_dg_category_en.pdf.

9. Data for comitology committees from 2006 and for Council committees from 2005; in addition there were 121 sub-groups under the Council working parties and committees (Hayes-Renshaw and Wallace 2006).

10. Since there is uncertainty attached to the accuracy of the data from the years prior to the establishment of the register, some of this increase might reflect more rigorous methods for reporting.

11. As noted earlier, there is some uncertainty regarding the accuracy of the measure from 2000.

12. A similar argument is voiced in theory by Broscheid and Coen because they expect to see more expert groups in regulatory policies as the nature of the policy good in these policy areas affect limited sets of societal actors in combination with high demand for technical information. However, they fail to find support for this hypothesis in their data on expert fora creation; rather they find (insignificantly) more expert groups in distributive policy domains (Broscheid and Coen 2007).