Perspectives on EU governance: an empirical assessment of the political attitudes of EU agency professionals

Abstract

European Union (EU)-level agencies have emerged as important actors on the EU's policy-making scene. To date, we know relatively little about the personnel working in EU agencies: what attitudes do EU agency staff members hold on issue-dimensions relevant for the EU integration process? How do they perceive of their role in EU policy-making? Moreover, we know little about the cohesiveness of attitudes of agency staff within and between different EU agencies. The aim of this contribution is conceptually and empirically descriptive. It draws on original data from an online survey of professionals working in EU agencies to gain insights into the attitudes held by EU agency staff on three substantive attitudinal dimensions: conceptions relating to legitimate and accountable EU governance, conceptions about the preferred level of centralization of political authority in the EU, as well as views on economic governance in the EU. While the conceptual focus of this paper is on attitudes and not on behaviour, the attitudes held by EU agency staff and their relative homo- or heterogeneity is likely to affect perceptions and evaluations of the political environment and interpretations of the challenges agency staff members face in their substantive area of work. The findings of the survey will enable us to draw broader conclusions about the type and quality of accountability relationships as well as of the EU's democratic legitimacy. Moreover, the data will permit to inform arguments about the actor quality of EU agencies, which are often conceived as efficient institutional solutions to overcome credibility problems.

Keywords:

• Administrative élites
• agencies
• attitudes
• EU integration
• legitimacy

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We wish to thank the participants of the workshop ‘Agency Governance in the EU and its Consequences’, held at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research in September 2010, as well as the JEPP referees for their comments on the paper. Moreover, helpful comments were provided by panel participants and discussants at the conference of the ECPR Standing Group on the European Union in Porto, June 2010, and the UACES conference in Bruges, September 2010.

Notes

This paper is part of the research project ‘Agency governance and its challenges to the EU's system of representation’, jointly led by the two authors and based at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES). The project is affiliated to the FP7 Integrated Project ‘Reconstituting Democracy in Europe’ (RECON) and financed by ARENA (Centre for European Studies) at the University of Oslo.

We sent our survey to 734 individuals, seven of whom let us know that they are only involved in clerical tasks and therefore not part of the population, which is of interest to us in this study. Another seven persons were not working for the respective agency anymore.

Respondents in our sample have an average age of 45 and are fairly equally distributed as regards their sex (42 per cent women vs. 58 per cent men). Almost all earned a university degree (96 per cent; 38 per cent hold a doctoral degree), with natural scientists/mathematicians constituting the largest group (33 per cent), followed by social scientists (18 per cent) and business administrators/economists (13 per cent). Moreover, our sample covers nationals from 20 EU member states and five non-EU member states, with Italians (18 per cent) and Germans (15 per cent) being the most frequent respondents. Given the relative heterogeneity of our respondents along relevant criteria, the results should not be driven by respondents with particular characteristics. Since, however, we have no information on the demographics in the overall target population, let alone in all EU agencies, we are not able to assess the representativeness of our sample.

Consequently, correlation coefficients among different factors (items) are moderate at best, reflecting the fact that agency personnel can, for example, have a very positive attitude towards majoritarian politics in general (questions 2 and 3 in Table 2) but at the same time hold the opinion that their own work should be evaluated strictly in terms of professional standards (questions 5 and 8 in Table 2).

Since variances for some items differ between agencies and sample sizes for individual agencies vary considerably, we chose a non-parametric test of variance (Kruskal–Wallis) to test for differences between agencies.

Correlation coefficients are non-parametric, rank-based, Kendall tau-b values. A list of pairwise correlations of all items, ranging between −0.25 and 0.30, is available from the authors upon request.

While not ruling out ideological conflicts, staff members do not seem to see it as a complement to professionally based accountability, as the two items are not strongly positively related (r(τ _B): 0.10, p(z): 0.14).

We included a number of questions on the ‘mode’ of decision-making inside agencies in our survey: ‘Normally there is agreement among the employees of the agency on how to proceed, and me and my colleagues do not really differ on the positions we upon different issues’ (54 per cent: agree somewhat, 26 per cent: agree strongly; N  =  189); ‘When taking decisions, it normally takes quite a while until we find a common position within the agency and are able to take a decision in consensus’ (38 per cent: agree somewhat; 14 per cent: agree strongly); ‘We regularly take decisions, even if consensus among the relevant members of the agency cannot be established’ (38 per cent: agree somewhat; 14 per cent: agree strongly).

Hooghe originally used a four-point scale for her answer (disagree with reservation, disagree without reservation, agree without reservation, agree with reservation). She subsequently coded those not answering as ‘undecided’ and introduced this middle category (Hooghe 2001: 69). In our discussion, we treat Hooghe's scale as equivalent to ours. The number of responses to Hooghe's survey for the items discussed here varies between 103 and 105.

The findings of this paper support the conclusions drawn by Trondal (2010) and Trondal and Jeppesen (2008).