The European Commission and the Financial and Economic Crisis: Views from the inside

Much recent scholarship has been concerned with the institutional outcome of the crisis and whether the steps taken by the EU to address it have resulted in a 'new intergovernmentalism', centred on the European Council, or in expanded powers and influence for the European Commission. Little attention, however, has so far been directed towards the views or the diagnoses of staff within any of the institutions. Drawing on unique primary data collected by the authors in 2014 (online survey n=5545; interviews n=231), this paper has two main aims. The first is to examine how staff across the organization perceive the crisis and its effects on the position of the Commission and of other institutions and actors, their morale, both individual and institutional, and their attitudes towards the main austerity measure directed at the EU institutions, namely, the 2014 reform of the EU staff regulations. The paper’s second objective, using a pseudo-panel drawn from the 2014 data and a 2008 survey (n=1901) conducted by the same authors, is to assess the impact of the crisis on the views of staff concerning the role and status of the Commission, their perceptions of the balance of power between EU institutions, and their ideological positions on economic governance. In both instances, the paper tests hypotheses based on nationality, functional responsibility, and ideological outlook.