Non-exclusive delegation to the European External Action Service

twenty years of principal-agent research in EU politics: how to cope with complexity?

“…majority voting or unanimity in the Council). These rules, together with power asymmetries within the collective principal, give (individual) members of it credible instruments of (individual) control even if they need to act as a collective (Adriaensen, 2016;Dijkstra, 2017).…”

“…It is exactly the observation of anomalies that deviate from the basic principal-agent model which warrant our attention. The principal having an incentive to limit its control over the agent (beyond it being costly) (Majone, 2001), the agent's decision to establish additional mechanisms of oversight (Coremans and Kerremans, 2017) or the motivations of the member states to create the EEAS and the High Representative as means of external representation while continuing their national foreign operations (Dijkstra, 2017), all raise tempting questions that would have remained hidden without a mapping of an institutional set-up in principal-agent terms.…”

“…Whereas Dijkstra speaks of 'non-exclusive delegation' when observing the member states fulfilling the same tasks as those delegated to the EEAS (Dijkstra, 2017), Menz used the term 'principal slippage' to describe a similar phenomenon, in this case in the area of EU migration policy (Menz, 2015). Here too, it would be good for subsequent literature to inquire into the motives for the principals to withhold some of their powers or the decision of principals to engage alongside the agent in executing the delegated task and on the consequences for the latter's discretion rather thanonce more -describing the observed phenomenon.…”