In the last four decades, the European Union created 38 agencies. EU agencies enjoy different levels of discretion in their tasks: Some EU agencies are legally very independent from EU legislators, while others operate with little formal independence. What explains these differences in formal independence among EU agencies?
We test explanations for the formal, de jure independence of EU agencies with a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) utilising a dataset that captures EU agencies’ formal independence at the time of their creation. We test two functional explanations for EU agencies’ independence, namely whether more decision-making competences and more complexity of their tasks positively impact their formal independence. We, further, test a political explanation for EU agencies’ independence, namely whether a stronger contestation of the decision to create an agency negatively impacts their formal independence. Finally, we test a bureaucratic politics hypothesis, namely whether the pre-existence of a European network of national agencies positively impacts EU agencies’ formal independence as such agencies domestically lobby for an independent agency.
The paper makes a twofold contribution. First, the QCA offers explanatory paths for individual EU agencies’ independence, allowing us to make sense of the diverse EU agency landscape. Second, it lays the ground for a future comparison of the factors explaining de jure and de facto independence.
