Balancing Roles of Representation in the European Commission

Abstract

Representation is one essential dimension of executive governance. This article has a dual ambition: The first is to outline an institutional perspective on representation that may explore and explain the everyday balancing act of representation among government officials. The second ambition is to empirically illuminate dynamics of representation among crucial test-bed inside the European Commission, that of temporary officials. Temporary Commission officials offer a valuable laboratory for exploring the fine balancing act of representation. Based on survey and interview data on temporary Commission officials, this study supports an institutional perspective on representation in two ways. First, temporary Commission officials tend to evoke a tripartite representational repertoire consisting of departmental, epistemic and supranational roles. Second, the composite mix of representational roles evoked by these officials is biased by the organisational boundaries and hierarchies embedding them. Representation within the Commission is a balancing act that is considerably biased by (i) the formal organisation of the Commission, (ii) the multiple organisational embeddedness of the staff, (iii) their degrees of organisational affiliation towards the Commission, (iv) their modes of interaction within the Commission, as well as (v) their educational backgrounds.