This paper shows how the framing of complex policy issues on the EU legislative agenda influences the processing of political interests and ideas and their expression in policy choices. By tracing the policy-making process in the field of EU biotechnology over a twenty-year period, the analysis...

The EU’s administrative systems relies to a considerable extend on the delegation of executive tasks to the European Commission, which is in turn controlled in this task through a plethora of implementing committees – the so-called ‘comitology’ system. Considering the centrality of...

Why do democracies give birth to bureaucracies and bureaucrats? How and why has a seemingly undesirable and unviable organizational form weathered relentless criticism over many years and is possibly experiencing a renaissance? Normative democratic theory, theories of formal organizations, and...

Who provides the European Union with information? Are these sources of information biased? Who are excluded and who are included? What can the informational bias tell us about decision making in the European Union? The paper examines patterns of participation in the large and organized expert...

The High Authority, later the European Commission, was indeed an organisational innovation. Unlike international governmental organisations, it should from its very inception be able to act independently of national governments. Its autonomy was to be justified by its role as a promoter of the...

While role behaviour and conflict dimensions in the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union have been fairly well documented, studies on the internal functioning of the College of the European Commission have been almost lacking. Thus, highly inconsistent images exist; ranging...

The relationship between the member states and the Commission is at the heart of the EU's institutional structure and at the centre of debates about the European Union. In the 1990s, the new institutionalism and the multi-level governance approach emphasised the limitations of state power in EU...

The European Commission (Commission) occupies a pivotal role as the key executive institution of the European Union (EU). Yet, the factual autonomy of the Commission remains largely unexplored, contributing to contradictory assessments of it. The ambition of this study is to reassess the...

Case studies indicate that national governments may be partly split so that national (regulatory) agencies operate in a ‘double-hatted’ manner, serving both ministerial departments and the European Commission. Applying large-N questionnaire data this paper follows up these studies by...

The EU is frequently understood as a special kind of governance system characterized by its strong degree of interpenetration of different levels of government and a plethora of interactions between EU institutions, administrations from national and subnational levels, as well as organized...