European Commissioners: Committed Europeans or Member State Agents?

本项目旨在回答这样一个问题：在什么情况下，欧盟委员会成员，即欧盟委员会委员，是作为忠诚的欧洲人行事，还是作为成员国政府的代理人行事。作为欧盟政治的执行者，委员们发挥着重要的政治影响力。在他们的任期开始时，他们发誓“……”完全独立地执行（.）（.）在履行职责时，为了本联盟的普遍利益[和]（.）任务，既不寻求也不接受任何政府的指示（.）。“人们一再怀疑这一誓言在实践中是否得到尊重。核心问题是专员的任命机制。他们实际上是由成员国政府任命的，被提名的候选人很少被拒绝。基于委托代理理论，我们认为，专员由此成为“代理人”的成员国政府。学术研究之前已经意识到这个项目将解决的问题。但是，很难对相互竞争的主张进行经验性的描述，因为委员会在其交易中相当不透明，而且为了揭露政治上的不一致而与高级政治家进行面谈的情况相当罕见。因此，关于个别专员日常工作的问题尚未得到最后的答复。尽管如此，还是有一些重要的贡献。事实表明，委员们对自己的作用确实有不同的理解。下一步是说明在什么情况下会合并不同的角色。该项目的核心假设是，专员与成员国政府的密切关系会导致专员方面的代理人导向行为。其他需要考虑的独立变量是成员国的大小，在委员会度过的时间，委员的年龄，出身和党派家庭。该项目的主要挑战是使因变量可操作化。该项目提出了现代定量文本分析方法来做到这一点。委员们的发言提供了丰富的资料来源，可以用把文字当作数据的方法加以分析。这样做的不同可能性将导致有趣的结果。欧盟研究的一个新来源和一个迄今为止尚未回答的研究问题相结合，是对欧盟委员会研究的重大贡献。

This project aims at answering the question under what circumstances members of the European Commission, i.e. European Commissioners, act rather as committed Europeans or as agents of their member states' governments. As executives of the EU polity, Commissioners exert significant political influence. At the beginning of their term they swear to '(...) be completely independent in carrying out (...) responsibilities, in the general interest of the Union [and] in the performance of (...) tasks, neither to seek nor to take instructions from any Government (...).' It has repeatedly been doubted whether this oath is respected in practice. The core problem is the Commissioners' appointment mechanism. They are de facto appointed by the member states' governments, and proposed candidates are rarely refused. Based on principal-agent theory, we argue that Commissioners hereby become 'agents' of their member state governments. Academic research has previously been aware of the issue this project will address. But empirical accounts of the competing claims are difficult to produce, since the Commission is rather opaque in its dealings and interviews with high-ranking politicians in order to uncover political allegiances are rather exceptional. Therefore, questions regarding individual Commissioners' day-to-day workings have not yet conclusively been answered. Nevertheless, there are some important contributions. It has been shown that Commissioners do have different understandings of their roles. The next step is to show under what circumstances different roles are incorporated. The core hypothesis of this project is that the closeness of a Commissioner to her member state's government leads to agent-oriented behaviour on the side of the Commissioner. Other independent variables to be considered are the member state size, time spent in the Commission, the Commissioner's age, origin, and party family. This project's main challenge is operationalizing the dependent variable. This project proposes modern methods of quantitative text analysis to do so. Commissioners' speeches provide a rich source to be analysed with methods treating words as data. Different possibilities to do so will lead to interesting results. The combination of a new source in EU research and a so far unanswered research question is a significant contribution to research on the European Commission.