Where have all the lawyers gone? Structure and transformations of the top European Commission officials' legal training
Founded on a prosopographical analysis of the European Commission¹s top civil servants, this paper gathers data in order to contribute to the analysis of the European legal capital in two ways. First, we show that while jurists (i.e. agents for whom law was the main element of their training) integrated the European Commission administration very early on, and acquired dominant positions, they were strong only insofar as their legal training was the basis of a broader undertaking of construction and acquisition of a more general bureaucratic capital. Secondly, we demonstrate that this ability to hold dominant positions within the machine tends to be increasingly contested with the rise of other agents, especially economists, whose properties tend to become indispensable for a high level career within the European Commission.
The Organization of Professional Expertise in the European Commission
What kind of professional experts dominate within the European Commission—lawyers, economists or others? Driven by the notion that the role of professional experts is shaped by organizational features, the article examines how different kinds of expertise are inscribed in the Commission’s recruitment system and organizational structure. The analysis shows that while economics may have overtaken law as the most common educational background in the Commission, neither the recruitment system nor the departmental structure appears to encourage the development of economic expertise. The proportion of staff hired through economics competitions has dropped markedly, and there are few specialized units for economic analysis in the organization. More generally, the Commission’s hiring policies and organizational hierarchy do not seem conducive to strong expert roles. The picture that emerges is that of an organization where expert knowledge is neither tied to a particular profession nor firmly rooted in the departmental structure.
Latin America and the Caribbean in the International System
A Framework For Analysis * The International System * The Latin American and Caribbean Regional Subsystem * Explanations and Prescriptions The Nation-State Actors * The Latin American and Caribbean States * Nonhemispheric States and Canada * The United States International Institutions * Intra-American Integration and Other Associations * The Inter-American System * Global and Extraregional Arrangements Transnational Actors * Transnational Entities * Subnational Actors and Networks Interstate And Transnational Relations * Warfare and its Approximations * Economic Policies and Relations * Political Regimes and International Processes * Intersocietal Relations