The influence of background factors of EU officials and Member States' diplomats seconded to the European External Action Service
Literature on representative bureaucracy (RB) assumes that officials’ background (gender, nationality or ethnicity, education and expertise) matters for the legitimacy of an administration. Representation, understood as 'passive RB, is a mirror of a society under the jurisdiction of this administration. Beyond the legitimacy aspect of having all groups of the society represented in the demography of government institutions, there lies however the question of 'active representation', i.e. whether and to what extent these demographical background factors have an impact on the organizational behavior.
Organizations are governed by values, norms, rules, and procedures, formal and informal, of how to behave and how to decide. Many issues and questions, to different extents, are left to the discretion of an official, and we cannot exclude that these issues and questions are of significance. Officials’ own values, beliefs, norms, identity and opinions, but also cognitive limitations may affect their behavior, and ultimately - through acts of individual or collective decision-making - the organizational behavior. The puzzle this contribution addresses is whether and how the combination of agents from different institutional provenance and socialization influences European foreign policy.
Based on two fresh data-sets, a survey among 184 EU foreign policy bureaucrats and 46 elite interviews with decision-makers, I demonstrate how the mix of organizational affiliation and sources of recruitment influence conflicts and cleavages, contact patterns as well as the loyalty of officials, and, further, the behaviour of the EU foreign policy machinery.
