European Commissioners: Committed Europeans or Member State Agents?

这个项目旨在回答这样一个问题：在什么情况下，欧盟委员会的成员，即欧盟专员，更像是忠诚的欧洲人，还是成员国政府的代理人。作为欧盟政策的执行者，委员们发挥着重要的政治影响力。在他们的任期开始时，他们宣誓“（……）完全独立地履行（……）职责，为了欧盟的普遍利益[和]履行（……）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，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要解决的问题。但是，由于委员会在其交易中相当不透明，并且为了揭露政治忠诚而采访高级政治家的情况相当罕见，因此很难对相互竞争的主张进行实证分析。因此，有关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确实有不同的理解。下一步是显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亲密关系导致专员一方的代理导向行为。其他需要考虑的独立变量包括成员国的大小、在委员会工作的时间、委员的年龄、出身和党派家庭。该项目的主要挑战是因变量的操作化。这个项目提出了定量文本分析的现代方法来做到这一点。委员们的演讲提供了丰富的资源，可以用把文字当作数据的方法来分析。这样做的不同可能性将导致有趣的结果。欧盟研究的新来源和迄今为止尚未解决的研究问题的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.