Political–Bureaucratic Accountability in the EU Commission: Modernising the Executive

Abstract

The basic accountability system of the European Commission has changed over the last decade. New structures and rules with a range of ex ante constraints and ex post incentives have combined to provide a system for more control and accountability in and over the Commission. This paper uses two concepts of accountability – a passive and an active one – to analyse the modernisation of accountability at the top of the European Commission. Drawing on documentary evidence of politics during the Prodi (1999–2004) and Barroso I years (2004–09) and on interviews held with senior Commission officials during the Barroso incumbency, it shows how strengthened accountability mechanisms and a shift in the dominant types of accountability have characterised the modernisation of the Commission's executive accountability system. In addition to legal and professional accountability systems, an elaborate mixture of accountability mechanisms was created that stressed political and bureaucratic mechanisms and that have created new expectations of accountability on the part of commissioners and their senior officials.

Acknowledgements

This article partly builds on a chapter on accountability which will be published in Bovens et al. (2010). I would like to thank Mark Bovens, Deirdre Curtin, Paul 't Hart, Morten Egeberg and Hussein Kassim and an anonymous reviewer of this journal for their helpful comments on a previous version of this article. I also thank the participants in the EU Consent Workshop ‘The European Commission: Inside and Out’, at the University of Edinburgh; and the participants at the Fourth Transatlantic Dialogue workshop ‘The Dynamics of IGR at the National, Supranational (EU) and International (UN) Level’ at Bocconi University, Milan. I am indebted to the Utrecht School of Governance where I had the privilege to conduct this research and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for funding the project.

Notes

1. Blair in the British Parliament source: ‘Mass Resignation by the European Commission’, 17 March 1999, available at WSW.org; http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/mar1999/ec-m17. shtml (accessed 20 September 2009).

2. A lengthier version of this section can be found in Wille (2010)

3. The Commission is a college and the proper course of action would be to develop the next five-year working programme together with the new team of commissioners. When you consider it, the treaties – present and future – are very inconsistent in this area. It would be logical to approve a Commission on the basis of its five-year work programme. But that can only be done when the Commission is already approved.

4. The position of the president has – besides legal reinforcements – also gained in importance due to the higher number of commissioners (or better: the increased number of member states); as the number increased from 15 to 27 member states, the relative weight of individual member states decreased and this increased the opportunity for political leadership of the president.

5. Discontent among top officials about the growing body of rules and regulations, which is thought to be burdensome, frustrating and demotivating, also emerges from other studies. The findings of Schön-Quinlivan (2007) and Ellinas and Suleiman (2008) indicate dissatisfaction among officials in the Commission about the tendency toward the bureaucratisation brought about by the reforms, especially with regard to financial rules; and that the reform had over-shot the mark and significantly increased the level of red-tape in the institution.

6. The system is not perfect yet. The EP revealed some weaknesses in the supervisory and control systems in several financial areas and has asked the Commission to take these flaws into consideration and to work to a further strengthening of the accountability architecture in the Commission (European Parliament 2007).