The EU Comitology system: what role for the Commision?

Abstract

The literature on comitology has largely ignored the European Commission's actual behaviour in the daily workings of the numerous comitology committees that were designed to control it. On the basis of survey data of Danish and Dutch representatives on nearly all comitology committees, this paper investigates the Commission's role in the system. We find that the Commission acts both as a mediator and as a policy advocate, but to varying degrees. We take a first step towards understanding this behaviour by an inspection of four arguments found in the literature on comitology and the Commission: the constraining or enabling impact of the comitology procedures; the institutional position of the responsible Directorate-General; the nature of the cases dealt with by the committees and, finally, the intensity of the member states' preferences in relation to the committees' cases. In comitology, each of these arguments shapes the mediating or the advocating behaviour of the Commission.