Juncker’s Political Commission: Did it Work?

  • The ‘political Commission’ may be the defining idea of the Juncker Presidency. But did it work? This paper is devoted to analysing how the notion of a political Commission has framed the organization and policy-making of the Juncker Commission. The idea of the political Commission was to allow the Commission to streamline its agenda and focus on a narrower number of proposals. In the words of the 2018 State of the Union address: to be ‘bigger on the big things and smaller on the small things’. In reality, external constraints, and in particular the divergent preferences and electoral cycles of national governments, have frustrated this promise. The Commission’s confinement to a relatively narrow set of regulatory (rather than distributive) tools limits its ability to be politically responsive to the main challenges the Union currently faces. At the same time, the political Commission undermines some elements of the Commission’s regulatory legitimacy – for example, its promise to be a neutral arbiter in the enforcement of competition, internal market and rule of law norms. While the political Commission continues to be a normatively attractive idea, it has fitted poorly with the institutional and political constraints surrounding the Juncker Presidency. This carries implications for the next Commission and the fate of the Spitzenkandidaten process.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Working Paper
Language:English
Author(s):Mark DawsonORCiD
Parent Title (English):SIEPS - Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies
Publication year:2019
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
Related URL:http://www.sieps.se/en/publications/2019/junckers-political-commission-did-it-work/
Release Date:2019/06/13
Notes:
This paper draws on some ideas discussed in an earlier piece in the Verfassungsblog: ‘Evaluating
Juncker’s Political Commission: The Right Idea in the Wrong Hands?’, available at: https://
verfassungsblog.de/evaluating-junckers-political-commission-the-right-idea-in-the-wrong-hands/
Hertie School Research:Jacques Delors Centre
Licence of document (German):Metadaten / metadata
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