One-day workshop on 27 November 2015
NUI Offices, 49 Merrion Square, Dublin 2
EVENT SPONSORS
This one-day workshop is concluding a larger research project kindly financed by the
Irish Research Council Starter Grant, entitled ‘The role of the European Commission
in multi-level financial management in the European Union: a step closer to
governmentalizing and further integration?’
The power of the purse being at the heart of political power and influence, this
project looks at the Commission’s increasing involvement in economic policy
coordination, fiscal monitoring and financial assistance. It analyses whether the
institution has become the leading core executive in the European Union since the
launch of the second phase of the Economic and Monetary Union.
We are also grateful to the Strategic Research Fund of University College Cork for
contributing to financing this workshop.
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SNAPSHOT OF YOUR TIME IN DUBLIN
Thursday 26 November
Arrival at your leisure
From 15.00 onwards
:
possibility to check into Hotel Alexander, 41-47 Fenian Street
19.30
:
dinner at Dunne & Crescenzi, 16 South Frederick Street
Friday 27 November
9.45 – 10.00
:
arrival at the workshop in NUI offices, 49 Merrion Square
10.00
:
start of the workshop and welcome by Emmanuelle Schön-Quinlivan
10.05 – 12.10
:
first panel of the workshop
12.10 – 13.00
:
lunch provided at the workshop
13.00 – 14.30
:
second panel of the workshop
14.30 – 15.00
:
discussion on future avenues for research and publication
15.00
:
end of the workshop
15.00 – 16.00
:
taxis arranged to bring guest speakers back to Dublin airport
NB: if you need to contact Emmanuelle once you have arrived in Dublin, her mobile number is
00353 85 77 46971.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Workshop theme.………….…………………………………….…. p. 5
2. Workshop schedule. ………..…………………………………….
p. 6
3. Guest speakers and abstracts.…………………………………
p. 7
4. Practical details…………………………………………..………….. p. 11
5. Contact details…………………………………………….………….
p. 14
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WORKSHOP THEME
Since 2009, many articles and books have been written on the causes to the Eurozone crisis, the
potential solutions as well as their consequences for European economic integration. Most of the
literature has taken a liberal intergovernmentalist approach or even ‘new intergovermentalist’
stance which focuses on the prevalence of the Member States’ role in the handling of the crisis
and the consequential relegation of the European Commission as an unwilling agent in
manoeuvring to gain more powers. In a multi-level economic governance context which has seen
the reshuffling of the power cards between the various stakeholders, this workshop has selected
contributions addressing issues of power, supranational entrepreneurship and integration.
The first panel looks at the Commission’s role in a new political and institutional environment
which has seen an increase in public skepticism on the European Union action (Bauer). It debates
the view that the Commission is the great loser in terms of power and influence as a consequence
of the new European economic architecture and analyses how the Commission’s empowerment
came about in the case of the its role in the Stability and Growth Pact (Scipioni). Carrying on with
the concept of supranational entrepreneurship, Spendzharova examines the role of the institution
regarding reforming EU rules on banking structure. Finally Schön-Quinlivan considers the
consequences of the institutional changes in the EMU for the debate about politicisation, not only
on sectorial scale but more in general for the EU project as a whole.
In the afternoon, the papers take a principal-agent framework to examine the politics of
asymmetric information and elucidate the relationships between member states and institutions
regarding credible data collection for the Excessive Deficit Procedure and the Macro-Economic
Imbalance Procedure (Savage). Following the same theoretical lines, Gren’s paper looks at the
distribution of functions between EU institutions and national competition authorities, two sets of
non-majoritarian bodies in the context of European economic governance. The findings of these
two papers are likely to shed new light on the key issue of whether and to what extent changes in
EMU governance led to more integration in both banking and economic supervision. Finally, with a
diametrically opposed assessment on the EMU changes, Hodson reflects on the link between this
round of reforms and the broader trends in EU integration in the last decades leading to questions
about legitimacy deficit in the EU.
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WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
‘Reflections on the new architecture of European economic governance’
Guest speakers:
10.00 to 10.05
10.05 to 11.30
Michael W. Bauer, University of Speyer
Dermot Hodson, Birkbeck College
Jakub Gren, University of Luxembourg
James Savage, University of Virginia
Emmanuelle Schön-Quinlivan, University College Cork
Marco Scipioni, London School of Economics
Aneta Spendzharova, University of Maastricht
Welcome by Emmanuelle Schön-Quinlivan
Marco Scipioni (and E. Schön-Quinlivan), ‘Policy
Chaired by TBC
entrepreneurship, windows of opportunity and
supranational delegation: a comparative analysis of the
2005 and 2010 reform of the Stability and Growth Pact’
Aneta Spendzharova, ‘Balancing Harmonisation and
Diversity of National Economic Models: The Role of the
European Commission in Reforming Banking Structures in
the EU’
Michael W. Bauer (and Stefan Becker, Sara Connolly and
Hussein Kassim), ‘Mapping the European Commission in
the ‘new’ political and institutional architecture of the
European Union: Constraints, functions, capacities’
11.30 to 12.10
12.10 to 13.00
13.00 to 14.00
Emmanuelle Schön-Quinlivan, ‘Increasing authority and
politicisation of the European Commission: a systemic
‘normalization’ of the core executive in European
economic governance?’
Questions and answers
Lunch
Jakub Gren (and David Howarth), A tale of agents with Chaired by
two hats: national supervision of less significant banks Aidan Regan
under supranational oversight in the Single Supervisory UCD
Mechanism.
James D. Savage, ‘Enforcing the European Semester: The
Politics of Asymmetric Information in the Excessive Deficit
and Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedures.’
14.00 to 14.30
14.30 to 15.00
Dermot Hodson, ‘EU Economic Governance Before and
After the Euro Crisis’
Questions and answers
Discussion on future research perspectives and publication opportunities
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Michael W. Bauer
(and Stefan Becker, Sara Connolly and Hussein Kassim)
‘The Commission: Boxed In and Constrained, Still an Engine of
Integration?’
While the formal mandate of the European Commission has not been changed for decades, the
political and institutional developments of the last years have altered the EU’s primary executive
in significant ways. Boxed in by the ever more active European Council, the empowered European
Parliament and a skeptical public, the Commission is undergoing a subtle but profound
transformation. Based on the study of recent Commission activity and data from two large-scale
surveys of executive officials and with focus on the Commission's role in post-crisis financial and
economic governance, this paper demonstrates that the Commission is increasingly occupied with
managing an ever more complex Union. This functional change correlates with a shift in capacities
towards more managerial authority. The Commission will undoubtedly remain a crucial actor in
the ‘new’ political and institutional architecture of the EU. It will continue to act as an engine of
integration. The Commission will most likely become a different engine, i.e. one that primarily
works under the surface of high-profile policy-making and focuses on policy management instead
of policy expansion.
Jakub Gren
(and David Howarth)
‘A tale of agents with two hats: national supervision of less
significant banks under supranational oversight in the Single
Supervisory Mechanism’
Our paper explores the institutional design of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) which is a
new vehicle for carrying out supervisory tasks in Banking Union (BU) and, in doing so, contributes
to the broader discussion of renewed post-crisis EU/EA economic governance. In the SSM,
significant institutions (SIs) are directly supervised by the European Central Bank (ECB) whereas
national supervisors (NCAs) continue to supervise less significant institutions (LSIs), but under the
ECB oversight. We concentrate on the second issue. We examine the relations governing the
supervision of less significant banks through the lens of Principal-Agent theory and seek to answer
whether the institutional design of the SSM provides a solid foundation to reduce country-specific
variations in the supervision of less significant banks across the SSM. Of wider interest to the study
of EU Economic Governance, we also consider the insights that can be drawn from applying P-A
theory to explore the relationships between non-majoritarian / non-elected bodies, which is of
relevance to a range of EU policy areas. We also examine a two-level Principal-Agent relationship
in the supervision of less significant banks in the SSM.
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In line with Principal-Agent theory, we identify a range of the Principal’s control mechanisms
which are at the disposal of the ECB and national governments. We see the NCAs as wearing two
hats — supranational and national — and acting as the Agents of two Principals with conflicting
long-term preferences. We conclude that the ECB has more powerful control mechanisms, but
when it comes to their full activation the central bank ultimately remains dependent on policy
choices ultimately made at national level.
Dermot Hodson
‘EU Economic Governance Before and After the Euro Crisis’
This paper explores changes to European Union (EU) economic governance in view of the euro
crisis. It considers two broad questions from a new intergovernmentalist perspective, and drawing
on the literatures on legalization and hyper-legalization. Can we conceptualise changes to EU
economic governance as European integration? What, if any link, is there between recent reforms
and the traditional drivers of European integration? Do changes to euro area governance address
or aggravate concerns over the EU’s perceived legitimacy deficit.
James D. Savage
‘Enforcing the European Semester: The Politics of Asymmetric
Information in the Excessive Deficit and Macroeconomic
Imbalance Procedures’
The European Semester was created in the wake of the Greek and Euro crises to strengthen and
deepen the fiscal and economic coordination of the European Union. At the center of the
Semester is an information-driven surveillance process that relies heavily upon data collected from
the member states and analyzed by the European Commission. This is true for both the Stability
and Growth Pack/Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP) and the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure
(MIP). Where the EDP relies on deficit and debt data to determine member state compliance, the
MIP is based on eleven "headline" indicators and eighteen "auxiliary" indicators as part of the EU's
economic alert mechanism, all of which require credible data to function. According to the Six
Pack, "The availability of fiscal data is crucial to the proper functioning of the budgetary
surveillance framework of the Union." As the Commission states, "Statistics are the backbone of
EU economic governance." This paper examines through a Principal-Agency framework the
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politics of how data collection and verification differ between the EDP and MIP, with implications
for the integrative processes of Europeanization and institutionalization. In particular, this paper
explores how the statistical requirements of Six Pack have been enforced by the Commission and
ECOFIN to strengthen the EDP and require member state compliance, while, at the same time, the
statistical integrity of the MIP has received less protection.
Emmanuelle Schön-Quinlivan
‘Increasing authority and politicisation of the European Commission:
a systemic ‘normalization’ of the core executive in European
economic governance?’
This paper looks at whether the authority transfers to the European Commission in the domain of
European economic governance have led to the systemic politicisation of the institution. Rather
than taking an internal approach to the politicisation of the institution focusing on its politicoadministrative dimensions (Wille, 2013), the key research question is grounded in a systemtheoretical view of politics which asks whether the content of the European Commission’s
decisions and the process followed to reach them have both become politicized.
In order to assess the impact of the European Commission’s increasing authority in economic
matters on the level of politicisation of the institution in the EU political system, this paper will use
the model of politicisation developed by De Wilde and Zürn (2012) and look at how political
opportunity structures mediate this relationship between international authority and
politicisation. The Commission would therefore be more than a ‘strategic manager’ (Bauer and
Becker, 2015) but not ‘yet’ a European economic government.
Marco Scipioni
(and Emmanuelle Schön-Quinlivan)
‘Policy entrepreneurship, windows of opportunity and supranational
delegation: a comparative analysis of the 2005 and 2010 reform of the
Stability and Growth Pact’
In the midst of an area which has traditionally been dominated by loose coordination methods,
the Stability and Growth Pact stands out for two reasons: it is the only set of legally binding rules
in existence in the Economic and Monetary Union and its two reforms in 2005 and 2011 were
triggered by a crisis of implementation which went in opposite directions regarding the allocation
of power to the European Commission. Opening the blackbox of European economic policymaking through careful process-tracing, this article argues that the coupling of a high problem
load with a high level of systemic ambiguity and an individual logic of political manipulation are
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necessary for policy entrepreneurs, such as DG ECFIN, to successfully open windows of
opportunity leading to ‘against the grain’ supranational delegation.
Aneta Spendzharova
‘Balancing Harmonisation and Diversity of National Economic
Models: The Role of the European Commission in Reforming Banking
Structures in the EU’
In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, policy-makers in the European Union (EU)
singled out three areas of policy reform as particularly important in order to tackle the risks
created by financial institutions that are “too big to fail”: (1) capital requirements, (2) bank
resolution regimes and (3) rules on banking structure. Progress towards a coherent supranational
framework and the degree of supranationalisation vary across the three areas, ranging from
extensive supranationalisation in the realm of capital adequacy standards to very limited
supranationalisation in banking structural reforms. This paper examines the dynamics of
composite policy reforms, focusing on the EU rules on banking structures. In particular, what has
been the role of the European Commission in the process of policy reform? The paper explores
how the Commission has balanced the ambitious European harmonisation agenda with member
state concerns about preserving the diversity of national banking, and economic, models.
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PRACTICAL DETAILS
1. The hotel
You will be staying in the Alexander Hotel where a room on a Bed and Breakfast basis has been
booked under your individual name. The hotel offers free Wifi.
The hotel is situated at 41-47 Fenian Street, Dublin 2.
00353 1 607 3700
2. From Dublin airport
The hotel is located 15kms from Dublin International Airport or approximately 20 minutes by taxi
travelling at off peak times.
 Via Aircoach (up to 50 minutes)
The Aircoach offers transfers to Kildare Street. Allow up to 50 minutes transfer time.
Click to view the Aircoach timetable.

Via Taxi: (20 – 45 minutes depending on time of day)
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Taxis are available from the forecourts directly outside Terminal 1 and Terminal 2.
Passengers should follow Taxi signage to the designated taxi ranks. A taxi dispatcher is
available at either taxi rank if you require any further information or assistance.
A taxi service is available to and from the hotel. You can travel via the main routes of via
the toll bridge.
3. Dinner on 26 November 2015 in Dunne & Crescenzi
There is a workshop dinner organised for all guest speakers on 26 November at 19.30 in Dunne &
Crescenzi on 16, South Frederick Street.
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4. The workshop
The workshop will start at 10.00 in the National University of Ireland offices at 49 Merrion Square,
Dublin 2. It will take place in the Boardroom.
It is a 5 minute walk from the Alexander Hotel.
5. Leaving the workshop
Most participants will be leaving Dublin on 27 November right after the workshop. We will book
taxis to get you to Dublin airport. Please let Emmanuelle know early on Friday 27 November
whether you will require a taxi.
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CONTACT DETAILS
Michael W. Bauer
German Research Institute for Public Administration
University of Speyer
michael.bauer@uni-speyer.de
Dermot Hodson
Department of Politics
Birkbeck College, UCL
d.hodson@bbk.ac.uk
Jakub Gren
Faculté des Lettres, des Sciences Humaines, des Arts et des Sciences de l'Education
Université de Luxembourg
jakub.gren@uni.lu
James D. Savage
Department of Politics
University of Virginia
jds2y@virginia.edu
Emmanuelle Schön-Quinlivan -- 00353 857746971
Department of Government
University College Cork
e.schon@ucc.ie
Marco Scipioni
Fellow in Migration and EU Politics
London School of Economics
m.scipioni@lse.ac.uk
Aneta B. Spendzharova
Political Science Department
Maastricht University, The Netherlands
a.spendzharova@maastrichtuniversity.nl
THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION
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