A comparison of two views on the European Commission: engine of integration and conduit of national interests

ABSTRACT

The conventional view of the Commission is that it is above the fray of national politics, and that Commissioners have allegiance to pan-European interests. However, research indicates that the Commission is in many ways imbued with national interests, despite being the engine of integration. This study examines the national Commissioner dividend, which is the tendency for the Commission’s policies on any given issue to agree more with the policy positions of the primarily responsible Commissioner’s home state than with other positions. We examine the conditions under which this national Commissioner dividend may be larger, including Commissioners’ partisanship and personal characteristics. The findings provide clear evidence of a national Commissioner dividend, notwithstanding the Commission’s general pro-integration and pan-European preferences. Moreover, the Commissioner dividend occurs in a broad range of circumstances. The study considers the implications of the findings for the Commission’s role in transmuting national interests into European-level policies.

KEYWORDS:

• European Commission
• commissioners
• European integration
• nationality
• political parties

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)

Notes

1 The view that the Commission is the engine of integration does not exclude the possibility that individual Commissioners attempt to pursue their national interests, but it does imply that they are ineffective in doing so.

2 The present study differs from previous research by Thomson (2011) in numerous ways. Most importantly it: (1) introduces the concept and measure of the national Commissioner dividend; (2) compares the national interest perspective directly with the integrationist perspective; and (3) specifies (and tests) a wider range of theoretical conditions under which the Commissioner dividend occurs.

3 While there are 359 issues in the analysis, on 316 of these issues both the Commission and the home member states of the responsible Commissioners have policy positions. Issues on which the responsible Commissioners’ home states did not take positions still provide valuable information on the likelihood that the Commission agrees with member states other than the responsible Commissioners’ home states.

4 The significant effects described in this section are similar to those found in a robustness test that used the absolute distance between the Commission’s and member states’ policy positions as the dependent variable. We also ran the model on integration-independence issues only with similar results.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Thomson

Robert Thomson is Professor of Political Science at Monash University in Melbourne. His research focuses on international comparisons of democratic representation and on international governance. This includes ongoing comparative work on parties’ election campaign promises and on European Union politics.

Patrick Dumont

Patrick Dumont is Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University. His research focuses on political elites, coalition politics, the politics of small states, and elections. This includes ongoing work on parties’ campaign promises, elites’ evaluations of public opinion and voting advice applications.