Data
Political Views of European Commission Officials
Since the 1990s I have been deeply interested in the political views and role perceptions of European Commission officials. I have now data for the mid-1990s, early 2000s, and the late 2000s.
a) Mid 1990s. The datasets below constitute the bedrock of my book "The European Commission and the Integration of Europe" (Cambridge University Press 2002) and a series of articles in BJPS, CPS, JOP and Governance (see my research page). The data were collected through personal interviews with 136 senior Commission officials (director-generals, deputy director-generals, directors) between 1995 and 1997. They show that Commission officials vary a great deal in how they think about Europe and their role in it, and this variation is to a large extent explained by socialization.
- » Codebook (MS Word document)
- » Replication dataset for analysis in chs 4-7 (SPSS 10)
- » Raw dataset, chs 2 and 3 (SPSS 10)
b) 2002. Some years after the Santer debacle I went back to the Commission to ask the same questions. I interviewed 97 officials, and found that the differences among senior Commission officials were a lot less structured than in the mid 1990s. A turbulent world had created turmoil inside the Commission, as my artide in International Organization (2005) explains.
- » Replication dataset (SPSS 10)
c) September 2008. Hussein Kassim, John Peterson, Michael Bauer, Renaud Dehousse, Andy Thompson, Sara Connolly and myself conducted a once-in-a-generation survey among all Commission officials. With 1900 responses, the survey ranges across a number of topics, including the impact of enlargement, administrative reform, the role of networks, and Commission officials political views. A co-authored book is coming out in 2012 with Oxford University Press. But you can find a taste of officials' political views in the post-enlargement Commission in my article in JCMS (2012)