"The European Commission: A balancing act between autonomy and dependence"

Lequesne, Christian. (1997) "The European Commission: A balancing act between autonomy and dependence". In: UNSPECIFIED, Seattle, WA. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

From the 1980s onwards, the growing interest of political science for the move of policy-making from the national to the EU level has been an occasion to revisit the research on EU institutions in general and on the Commission in particular. This has taken place in a broader evolution of political science research on the EU in Europe--and to a lesser extent in the United States--from international relations theory to political sociology and comparative politics. Taking into account different works without developing any specific case-study and adding more institutional approach to it, I will show how EU Commission agents can mobilize specific resources to behave as policy entrepreneurs in the EU policy making with a certain autonomy from national governments. I will then balance the argument of autonomy in arguing that policy entrepreneurship is limited by a series of endogenous and exogenous constraints which also make the Commission a dependent actor in the EU policy-making. The "balancing act"; between autonomy and dependence is from our point of view the main characteristic of the European Commission.

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