The Politics behind the Consultation of Expert Groups: An Instrument to Reduce Uncertainty or to Offset Salience?

Bart Van Ballaert

doi:10.17645/pag.v3i1.84

Abstract

This paper answers the following question: Do the uncertainty and salience of issues determine whether the European Commission will use an expert group to assist with policy formulation? Using rationalist theory, three hypotheses test whether transversality, the importance of standard-setting and the salience of a policy proposal determine whether a Commission DG will ask an expert group to assist in preparing that same proposal. Data was retrieved from official docu-ments via EUR-Lex. A binary logistic regression analysis has been conducted on a sample of 260 proposals that were drafted by DG Climate Action, DG Communications Networks, Content &amp; Technology, DG Environment and DG Internal Market and Services. All proposals were adopted between 2010 and 2013. The empirical analysis shows that expert group involvement in policy formulation is neither negligible nor ubiquitous in terms of frequency as expert groups as-sisted in preparing 33.5% of the proposals. DGs were significantly more likely to consult an expert group when the pro-posal under preparation was more transversal in nature and/or when that proposal treated standard-setting more pro-nouncedly. In contrast, the salience of a proposal was shown to be insignificantly related to the presence of an expert group during policy formulation.

Highlights

Issue This article is part of the special issue “The Role of Expert Knowledge in EU Executive Institutions”, edited by Professor Åse Gornitzka (University of Oslo, Norway) and Dr Cathrine Holst (University of Oslo, Norway)
This is puzzling because the lack of attention to issue characteristics left scholars wondering why the European Commission was using an expert group to assist in the preparation of some policy proposals while consulting no expert group regarding others
This paper examined whether issue characteristics affected the use of expert groups by the European Commission

Summary

Introduction

“Expertise is crucial for sound policies” or at least so argues the European Commission, which regularly consults expert groups. Problem-solving assumes that expert groups possess private information that is essential for the substantive quality of a proposal (Heard-Laureote, 2010) This suggests that the Commission services ask such groups to assist in the preparation of issues regarding which it experiences uncertainty. This paper asks the following question: Do the uncertainty and salience of issues determine whether the European Commission uses an expert group or not to assist with policy formulation?. Expert groups did not appear to play a role in the drafting of a major initiative such as “A Clean Air Programme for Europe” (European Commission, 2013) This is puzzling because the lack of attention to issue characteristics left scholars wondering why the European Commission was using an expert group to assist in the preparation of some policy proposals while consulting no expert group regarding others. Concluding remarks about the research and its implications for future work on expert groups will be presented

Expert Groups and the Black Box of Issue Characteristics

The Effect of Uncertainty and Salience on Expert Groups

Data and Method

Empirical Analysis

Findings

Conclusion