Measuring actual discretion of the European Commission: Using the discretion index to guide empirical research

Markus Gastinger and Eugénia C Heldt
Additional contact information
Markus Gastinger: Department of Political Science, 27257University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria
Eugénia C Heldt: Department of Governance, School of Social Sciences and Technology, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany; School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton NJ, USA

European Union Politics, 2022, vol. 23, issue 3, 541-558

Abstract: One key question in the study of the European Union has always been the extent of Commission discretion. We take the discretion index, typically used by principal–agent scholars to measure the Commission's designed discretion, to measure its actual discretion. Commission designed discretion can today be computationally generated with sufficient accuracy across all secondary acts. The study of designed discretion thus reaches considerable maturity. Therefore, we argue that scholars should prioritize studying Commission actual discretion. We present a systematic and transparent investigative technique based on the discretion index, which we use as a roadmap to guide our empirical investigation. The index facilitates the accumulation of knowledge across policy areas and time by providing exact values for Commission discretion. We illustrate our approach with the Development Cooperation Instrument.

Keywords: Discretion index; development cooperation; EU external relations; European Commission discretion; principal–agent model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14651165221098487 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:23:y:2022:i:3:p:541-558

DOI: 10.1177/14651165221098487

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().