The Watchdog or the Mandarin? Assessing the impact of the Directorates General on the EU legislative process

ABSTRACT

This article assesses the role of the Directorates Generals (DGs) led by the Commissioners in the EU legislative decision-making by testing two perspectives: ‘the Watchdog’ and ‘the Mandarin’ of the EU principals. The former suggests that a conflict of preferences between the DGs will notify the EU principals of prospective bureaucratic drift, leading to more restrictive discretionary limits imposed on the Commission in the implementation stage. However, if the lead DG acts as the Mandarin, proximity of its preference to the EU principals should result in more executive leeway as its policy preference is more beneficial for the EU legislators. To tests the conjunctions, this study focuses on two dimensions of EU political space: Left-Right (LR) and Pro/Anti-EU. The results suggest that the legislators will indulge the Commission with more leeway for the implementation when their preferences are more congruent with the position of the lead DG on the LR dimension, thus supporting ‘the Mandarin’ perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Directorates general
• discretionary limits
• EU commission
• legislative politics
• principal–agent

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the constructive comments from the editors and two anonymous reviewers. Additionally, I would like to thank Gerald Schneider, Friederike Kelle, and Dragoş Adăscăliţei for their continuous support and invaluable feedback on the earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Anastasia Ershova is a PhD Candidate at the Graduate School of Decision Sciences, University of Konstanz.

Notes

1. The DG would act as a de facto agency with certain discretion level due to the Commission’s organizational structure where each branch (DG) specializes in a policy subfield. They are in charge of the proposal formulation and implementation. Therefore, discussing the discretion of the EU Commission, one in fact underlines the leeway of a specific DG at the implementation stage.

2. DG for Internal Policies of the Union and Directorate for Legislative Coordination and Conciliations, Conciliation and Co-decision Unit. (2014) A Guide to how the European Parliament Co-legislates under OLP. http://www.epgencms.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/upload/3679a0a2-80fd-43c2-aec8-a72121ff3010/Guide-ordinary-legislative-procedure-en.pdf (accessed 3 November 2018).

3. Previous studies underline the influence of a Commissioner on the DG stances (e.g., Hartlapp et al. 2014: 266; Thomson 2008: 173). Thus, it is reasonable to use preferences of the Commissioner in charge on the relevant dimensions as proxies for the position of the DG.

4. The cut-point of 1 approximates to the mean absolute distance between the position of the lead DG and the median of the Commission on the LR and Pro-/Anti-EU dimension (µ(LR) = 0.92; µ(EU) = 1.1). Thus, only rather conflictual situations are coded as 1, whereas more consensual stances are treated as a reference category.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported by Landesgraduiertenförderungsgesetz (LGFG) Scholarship at the University of Konstanz.