‘Divided' Commission, or How Directorates Generals Affect Legislative Outcomes in the EU

‘Where you stand depends where on you sit’.This long-standing argument of bureaucratic politics has been largely overlooked by the EU scholars who choose to analyze the policy-making and bureaucratic interactions within the Union without opening up the black box of institutions. This is particularly the case when it comes to the Commission. The extant research mostly disregarded potential influence of the Directorates General (DGs) on the legislative policies and outcomes. This article aims to fill existing gap in the literature and challenge the unitary view of the Commission. To do so, I examine to what extent the preference configuration in the EU Commission affects the decision of the EU legislators to grant more discretion to the executive agent for the implementations stage. I rely on the Principal-Agent framework to explain the relationship between legislative and executive branches of the EU, and draw on the studies of bureaucratic politics. I expect the legislators to grant more discretion to the Commission, when an ideal position of a DG responsible for the policy implementation(DGr) is closer than the position expressed in the proposal of the Commission. However, the discretion will be more limited if the DGr’s preference significantly deviates from the positions of the legislators’ and the Commission’s proposal. This article contributes to our understanding of the EU internal functioning, and it sheds light on the importance of sub-institutional units within the Union. It shows to what extend the existence of divided interest can shape the political and policy realities in the EU.