The many faces of EU Committee Governance

Committees play a key role in maintaining a functioning European governance system. Their structure is varied throughout the Community system. The most prevalent are Commission Expert Committees, Council Working Parties and Comitology Committees. While the role of European Committees in the legislative process has come under renewed examination with the Commission’s White Paper on streamlining governance and increasing transparency, little comparative research has been done on the individual committee structures and ‘Europeanization’ of national officials in EU Committee work. This analysis looks more closely at how structural forces in different types of committees influence member behaviour.

The paper by Morten Egeberg, Guenther Schaefer and Jarle Trondal takes an empirical investigative approach, testing the allegiances and identities formed by national and officials in their EU Committee work. The authors interviewed 218 national officials in 14 Member States, who have attended Committee meetings. They found that expert opinion, rather than country size plays a pivitol role in determining the outcome of committee negotiations. Also, each committee member, regardless of committee type, expressed multiple allegiances and identities, including a sense of loyalty to the group itself. At the same time, they note that comitology groups display behavioural patterns that are strongly intergovernmental in character, while, Commission committees are more multi-facetted in this respect. The authors’ findings are analysed both from an institutional and from an organisational perspective.

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