 EU-level Agencies: New executive centre formation or vehicles for national control?Morten Egeberg and Jarle Trondal No 10, ARENA Working Papers from ARENA Abstract: The jury is still out with respect to whether EU-level agencies act primarily as tools of national governments or not, although parts of the literature as well as the legal framework of EU agencies seem to favour the former interpretation. We argue that EU agencies which might be able to act relatively independently of national governments and the Council, but not necessarily independently from the Commission, would contribute to executive centre formation at the European level, and thus to further transformation of the current political-administrative order. By measuring along several dimensions, we demonstrate that the Commission constitutes by far the most important partner of EU agencies. EU agencies deal (somewhat surprisingly) to a considerable extent with (quasi-) regulatory and politicised issues. When engaging in such areas, national ministries and the Council tend to strengthen their position, however, not to the detriment of the Commission. In addition to the Commission, national agencies make up the closest interlocutors in the daily life of EU agencies, indicating how EU-level agencies become building blocks in a multilevel Union administration, partly by-passing national ministries. We build our analysis on an on-line survey among senior officials in EU agencies. Keywords: public administration; European Council; European Commission (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erp:arenax:p0361 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in ARENA Working Papers from ARENA |
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