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How does the European Commission use scientific expertise? Results from a survey of scientific members of the Commission’s expert committees

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

Given the high levels of uncertainty and complexity of issues considered at the EU level, knowledge from sound and reliable sources of expertise is of a particular importance. To date, literature on the role of scientific knowledge and scientists in EU policy-making is relatively scarce. Furthermore, we know little about the scientists involved in EU policy-making: what attitudes do they hold regarding their contribution to policies shaped and adapted at the EU level? How do scientists perceive their role in EU policy-making? The article relies on new data from a survey of scientific members of the Commission’s expert committees to gain insights into the perceptions held by scientists on how their knowledge is used: the literature on knowledge utilisation suggests that an agent can use knowledge as an instrument to increase its problem-solving capacity (instrumental knowledge utilisation), but also for more strategic purposes such as support for predetermined policy preferences (substantiating knowledge utilisation), or as a way of promoting power and influence (legitimising knowledge utilisation). The study finds that strategic uses of knowledge are not highly prominent in the process of proposal drafting. On the contrary, we find that the instrumental mode is perceived as dominant by scientific contributors. Future research need to show whether this mode of scientific knowledge utilisation is also relevant for other stages in the EU policy-making process.

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Notes

  1. European Commission, ‘Register of Commission expert groups and other similar entities’. Source: http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regexpert/. Note that the Commission’s expert group register does not provide contact information. However, full name, surname, field, academic status and so on are indicated in most cases, and further contact information was provided by the scientists on the internet.

  2. The data provided by the Commission regarding the academic status of the members of Commission committees are not consistent. In some cases, the academic degree or title (PhD, Dr, Prof) was provided, in other cases it was indicated that experts are ‘scientists’ without further specification.

  3. The seven-point scale: 1 meaning that you strongly agree, 2 – moderately agree, 3 – slightly agree, 4 – neutral/neither agree nor disagree, 5 – slightly disagree, 6 – moderately disagree, 7 – strongly disagree. For the presentation purposes the seven-point scale is collapsed into ‘agree’, ‘neither agree/nor disagree’, or ‘disagree’. By recoding the seven-point scale into the three-point scale, the general trends of the responses become clearer.

  4. The protocol adopted here for factor analysis is to use the setting PCA and rotate the matrix of loadings to obtain orthogonal (independent) factors (Varimax rotation) of the 12 seven-point scale statements.

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Acknowledgements

The article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Dutch and the Flemish Associations of Political Science in Amsterdam, 31 May – 1 June 2012, the Sixth ECPR-SGEU Pan-European Conference on EU Politics, Tampere (Finland), 13–15 September, 2012 and Ludwig Maximilian University doctoral workshop in Munich, 26–27 November, 2012. The authors thank the participants of these conferences, as well as Berthold Rittberger, Michael Blauberger, Fabio Franchino, Jale Tosun and Sebastiaan Princen for insightful comments and suggestions. Julia Partheymüller deserves credit for methodological advice. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

The article was developed under the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union (Marie Curie Action): the Multi-disciplinary Initial Training Network (ITN) on Inter-institutional Cooperation in the EU (INCOOP).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mannheim University, MZES, A5, 6 (Building A), Mannheim, 68131, Germany

    Dovilė Rimkutė

  2. Department of Public Administration, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Faculty of Social Sciences, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, Rotterdam, PO Box 1738 3000 DR, The Netherlands

    Markus Haverland

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  1. Dovilė Rimkutė
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  2. Markus Haverland
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Correspondence to Dovilė Rimkutė.

Appendix

Appendix

Table A1

Table A1 Factor loadings and communalities based on a Principal Component Analysis with varimax rotationa for nine statements measuring three modes of knowledge utilisation (120)
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Table A2

Table A2 Descriptive statistics for the three modes of knowledge utilisation
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Rimkutė, D., Haverland, M. How does the European Commission use scientific expertise? Results from a survey of scientific members of the Commission’s expert committees. Comp Eur Polit 13, 430–449 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2013.32

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