The 'porous' Bureaucracy: A Comparative Analysis of EU Institutions' Interactions with Their External Environment

The literature on international bureaucracies tends to focus on their inner functioning in order to investigate the beliefs and values guiding them. However, the range and the frequency of a bureaucracy’s interactions with institutions and stakeholders outside its walls is bound to be telling of the porosity of the organisation to the external world and its responsiveness to societal challenges as they arise. Yet, the extent of bureaucracies’ interactions with the outside world has seldom been the object of systematic investigation. This paper draws on new empirical data from recent research on the European Commission (2014 survey achieved sample n=5545) and on the General Secretariat of the Council (2016 survey achieved sample n=1356) to study the patterns of their employees’ interaction with other European institutions as well as with different parts of civil society. It investigates how far the patterns of individual employees’ external contacts correspond to different understandings of their missions and different world-views.