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European Commissioners: Committed Europeans or Member State Agents?

欧盟委员：忠诚的欧洲人还是成员国代理人？

基本信息

批准号：
288228997
负责人：
Professor Dr. Torsten Jörg Selck
金额：
--
依托单位：
Institut für Sozialwissenschaften
依托单位国家：
德国
项目类别：
Research Grants
财政年份：
2015
资助国家：
德国
起止时间：
2014-12-31 至 2020-12-31
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/288228997?language=en
关键词：
European Commissioners Committed Europeans Member

项目摘要

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.

这个项目旨在回答这样一个问题：在什么情况下，欧洲委员会的成员，即欧洲委员会的委员，更像是忠诚的欧洲人或其成员国政府的代理人。作为欧盟政体的执行者，委员们具有重大的政治影响力。在他们任期开始时，他们发誓‘(……)完全独立地执行(……)在履行(……)方面的责任，符合本联盟的普遍利益任务，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。核心问题是委员的任命机制。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，我们认为委员因此成为其成员国政府的“代理人”。学术研究之前已经意识到这个项目将解决的问题。但很难对相互竞争的说法进行经验性的解释，因为欧盟委员会在处理事务时相当不透明，为了发现政治效忠而采访高级政客的情况相当罕见。因此，关于个别专员日常工作的问题尚未得到最终答复。尽管如此，还是有一些重要的贡献。事实表明，委员们对自己的角色有不同的理解。下一步是展示在什么情况下合并不同的角色。该项目的核心假设是，专员与其成员国政府的密切关系导致专员一方的代理人导向行为。其他要考虑的独立变量包括成员国的大小、在委员会中花费的时间、专员的年龄、出身和政党家庭。这个项目的主要挑战是使因变量具有可操作性。这个项目提出了定量文本分析的现代方法来做到这一点。委员们的发言为分析提供了丰富的来源，方法是将文字视为数据。这样做的不同可能性将导致有趣的结果。欧盟研究中的一个新来源和一个迄今尚未得到回答的研究问题的结合，是对欧盟委员会研究的重大贡献。