A supranational technocrat, a party political ideologue or a multinational?

This chapter examines the European Commission’s policy positions in more detail. The main explanatory question is the following: What factors explain variation in the Commission’s policy positions? In answering this question, this chapter explores the effects of characteristics of the commissioners who were responsible for formulating the Commission’s positions on each controversy. This chapter examines the effects of commissioners’ ideological, party political and national affiliations.

The Commission’s policy positions are particularly important in the legislative process of the European Union (EU), not least because the Commission has an effective monopoly on the introduction of legislative proposals. Although the Commission cannot refuse to introduce a legislative proposal if requested to do so by the Council or European Parliament (EP), neither of these other bodies can determine the contents of the proposal (Crombez et al. 2006: 331). The fact that the Commission formulates and introduces legislative proposals gives it the potential to exert considerable influence on decision outcomes. The EU’s rules of procedure stipulate that the Council can only amend the Commission’s proposal unanimously when the consultation procedure applies. Potentially at least, this means that the Commission can use the rules of procedure to ensure that decision outcomes are a close as possible to its policy preferences. We will examine this agenda-setting power in more detail in Chapter 7.