Researching European Union Agencies: What Have We Learnt (and Where Do We Go from Here)?

Abstract

This review article, with a clear political science and public administration bias, takes stock of the existing literature on EU agencies and suggests a future research agenda. The article reviews studies on EU agencies' organization, tasks, proliferation and location in the political‐administrative space. Whether the advent of EU agencies tends to underpin a basically intergovernmental, transnational or supranational order has potentially huge consequences for the distribution of power across levels of government, for the degree of policy uniformity and pooling of administrative resources across countries, for the role of genuinely European perspectives in the policy process, and for accountability relations. Although the jury is still partly out on most topics, we see the contours of a more direct multilevel administration in which EU agencies not only constitute nodes within transnational agency networks, but in addition, in governance terms, relate more closely to the European Commission than to any other institution.