Understanding Politics in the College of European Commissioners: Suggestions for a Research Agenda

Abstract:
This commentary discusses the state of the art in the academic literature on politics in the European Commission. We discuss scholarly advancements in the field and sketch out future research opportunities.

We argue that principal-agent theory might serve as a useful theoretical device in this area and that more empirical work should focus on the dynamics between appointing Commissioners and the work they do while being in office. More specifically, we suggest analysing Commissioners’ speeches with quantitative text analysis. This method is yet unused to extract Commissioners’ positions.