Organizational Culture and Reform: The Case of the European Commission under Jacques Santer

Europeanization; European Commission; institutionalisation; institutions; administrative adaptation

Good Governance and Institutional Change:Administrative Ethics Reform in the European Commission

The European Union institutions have always taken an interest in their own internal governance. In the 1990s, this interest began to be characterised by a greater reflexivity, increasingly allied to the concept of ‘good governance’. One example of this was in the field of public ethics where the European Commission came to recognise the importance of establishing structures and policies to govern the conduct of public servants (whether MEPs, Commissioners or EU officials). Drawing on historical institutionalism, this article considers the emergence and evolution of the Commission’s public ethics system after 1999. The article distinguishes between the formative and post-formative stage in the system’s emergence and evolution, arguing that in both periods, structural factors and agency, both externally and internally, were important in explaining institutional change. What was especially important in the formative period, however, was the intensity of the primary external driver of change, which in the case of the European Commission was the scandal over unethical conduct and mismanagement which hit the institution in 1998-9

Institutional Change and Ethics Management in the EU's College of Commissioners

Research Highlights and Abstract This article makes the following contribution: It identifies a gap in theoretical work on gradual institutional change by highlighting the importance of ‘reluctant agency’ that is, agents who do not oppose change outright, but are reluctant to agree to anything more than minimal reforms. It demonstrates the importance of the interplay of internal and external factors in explanations of gradual institutional change. It provides an empirical account of the evolution of the EU Commissioners' ethics regime since 1999. It identifies institutional change in the EU Commissioners' ethics regime as taking the form of a ‘layering’ process. It shows how institutional change in the EU Commissioners' ethics regime can be explained using a framework comprising political context, institutional characteristics and change agency (drawing on the work of Mahoney and Thelen). This article comprises a theory-informed case study of the European Commissioners' ethics regime. Conceptualising the evolution of the regime since 1999 as a process of gradual institutional change, it asks how the Commissioners' ethics regime continued to evolve incrementally after its inception, and what form that evolution took. Drawing on a recent theory of gradual institutional change (Mahoney and Thelen's), the article argues that the evolution of the Commissioners' ethics regime has involved a ‘layering’ process which has resulted from the Commission's changing position within the EU system (political context) and the extent of the Commission's control over the reform process (institutional characteristics). External change agents (the European Parliament and NGOs) are crucial, but so too is the Commission itself, which engages only reluctantly, in a risk-averse manner, in the on-going reform of the regime. </jats:p

From Soft Law to Hard Law?: Discretion and Rule-making in the Commission's State Aid Regime

governance; state aids; competition policy; regulation

EU Commission participation in the Troika mission: is there a European Union price to pay?

The article is intended to debate two questions regarding the involvement of the Commission in the Troika's action: firstly, considering the nature of financial assistance programs, it aims to discuss the effect of the Commission's participation in Troika negotiations on the balance of power of the EU institutions; and secondly, the article raises the issue of the Commission's liability for the results achieved by the financial assistance program, taking into account the extent of the conditions imposed, as well as the intensity of scrutiny by the Troika