Abstract
With European Union agencies becoming increasingly significant actors in European governance, further research is needed to understand how they interact with their environment. Applying the ‘reputation’ literature to Europol, this article examines in greater detail how agencies behave with their ‘informal’ audiences in comparison with the formal ones. It demonstrates that agencies are deeply invested in the shaping of their reputation, including towards their informal audiences especially if the latter represent ‘reputational threats.’ Based on a quantitative analysis of activity reports and on a qualitative study of the face-to-face engagements of Europol with the European Parliament over time, this research sheds light on the complementary communicative strategies agencies can use to (re)present themselves depending on the dimension of their reputation at stake.
Highlights
The agencification, i.e., the proliferation of European Union (EU) agencies since the 1990s, is depicted by some commentators as the “New Paradigm of European Governance” (Magnette, 2005) and has been well‐ documented in academic literature
We start by exploring which facets of its reputation Europol has attempted to convey through its annual activity reports, through face‐to‐face engagement, in order to confirm whether the agency has anticipated the 2009 transformation of the EP into one of its political masters and to test if it pri‐ oritises formal audiences over informal ones
Together with the electoral victories of right‐wing MEPs already driven by technical and per‐ formative dimensions, these evolutions lead to complex expectations of MEPs towards Europol without ending reputational threats over the agency
Summary
The agencification, i.e., the proliferation of European Union (EU) agencies since the 1990s, is depicted by some commentators as the “New Paradigm of European Governance” (Magnette, 2005) and has been well‐ documented in academic literature. Politics and Governance, 2021, Volume 9, Issue 3, Pages 85–95 insights to resolve these two issues, and is currently migrating from the study of domestic organisations to be applied at the EU stage, notably to understand EU agen‐ cies (Busuioc & Rimkute, 2020a, 2020b; Rimkute, 2020) On one hand, these recent publications have integrated cognitive dimensions in the logics of action and in the trajectory of an agency. We suppose agencies would anticipate and react to such legal transformations by further trying to shape their rep‐ utation in accordance with what they believe are the expectations of their new master, so as to maintain a strong level of autonomy To test this expectation, this article focuses on the case of Europol, the EU law enforcement agency in charge of facilitating the cooperation between national law enforcement to fight crime and terrorism through information exchanges, operational analysis, and exper‐ tise.
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