Capturing Changing Attitudes of European Commission Officials before and after Significant External and Internal Events. Repeat Cross Sections or Pseudo Panels?

A widely held assumption in the literature is that the beliefs of bureaucrats are relatively immutable. In the case of the European Commission, the assumption is even stronger; that ‘Eurocrats’ live in a Brussels bubble and are unaffected by the challenges that ordinary citizens experience. This paper uses an innovative method and unique data to challenge this view. Traditionally, the attitudes of those who work in such bureaucracies are measured through cross-sectional surveys. However, in attempting to measure change that controls for confounding variables, ideally it is necessary to be able to link the same respondents at each time point, such as through a panel survey. These are rarely conducted, in part due to the anonymity constraints imposed by participating organisations, which prevent respondent linkage.

This paper outlines methods employed to bring together two cross-sectional, on-line surveys carried out in 2008 and 2014 in order to make comparisons between the views of European Commission officials before and after three significant events external and internal to the organisation. Given the potential additional benefit of being able to use panel data to measure change over time, we have created sets of aggregated cases at each time period to derive pseudo panels to analyse change over the same period. A number of hypotheses are tested, based on expected shifts in attitudes as well as where changed would not be anticipated, and comparisons drawn between results using the cross-sectional datasets and the pseudo panels. Conclusions report the value and limitations of pseudo panels.