The Politics of Information in the EU: The Case of European Agencies

Abstract

It has been 15 years since Majone (1997) coined the notion ‘regulation by information’ to describe the increasing influence of EU agencies on the European decision-making process via their information and networking role. Ever since, we have witnessed a steady increase in scholarly interest in the process of agencification in the European Union. Agencies are studied from a multitude of perspectives, ranging from how they are created to questions related to their legitimacy, accountability, autonomy, and credibility (e.g., Groenleer 2009; Busuioc 2010). Yet we know relatively little about the way in which agencies actually process information and how this impacts the ‘what’ (i.e., the concrete content of their decisions) or the authority and legitimacy that agencies enjoy among their political principals and stakeholders. This chapter explores agencies from an information processing perspective as a research strategy that it is hoped may contribute to filling this gap. We will do this by (re)investigating two intensively studied agencies in the EU — the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) — and by critically confronting some of the interpretations and claims made in the academic literature on EFSA and EMA (e.g., Kelemen 2002; Krapohl 2004; Borrâs et al. 2007; Gehring and Krapohl 2007; Groenleer 2011).