Administrative capacity, structural choice and the creation of EU agencies

Abstract

Since the 1990s the EU has established an ever-increasing number of administrative agencies. Their creation has been seen as a result of policy-makers' acknowledgement of a credible commitment problem where trust in the Commission has gradually eroded. This article systematically tests this credible commitment hypothesis. While finding support for it as a normative ideal informing the Commission's governance strategy, there is little evidence of its acceptance by member countries. Rather the design decisions made in the Council of Ministers conform to the predictions of structural choice theory as there is an inverse relationship between the legal authority delegated to agencies and their formal autonomy.

Keywords:

• Credible commitment
• EU-governance
• isomorphism
• regulation
• structural choice

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are extremely grateful for the comments from two anonymous reviewers as well as Jens Blom-Hansen, Morten Egeberg, David Levi-Faur, Peter Bjerre Mortensen, Thomas Pallesen and S⊘ren Serritzlew.

Notes

See the Commission's White Paper on European governance (Commission 2001) and its draft interinstitutional agreement on the operating framework for the European regulatory agencies (Commission 2005).

The three agencies set up under an intergovernmental treaty regime were all established fairly late and within a short time span (2001, 2002 and 2004). Simultaneously, several agencies were created through EU legislation. Therefore the correlation between ‘year of establishment’ and ‘treaty regime’ is not significant (0.485, p-value = 0.136).