Book Review of 'The European Commission and Bureaucratic Autonomy: Europe’s Custodians'

This addition to the literature on the European Commission constitutes a contribution to studies of the post-Santer Commission. The book takes the bureaucratic autonomy literature as a theoretical basis (Chapter 2) and rests empirically on a survey of nearly 200 top Commission officials (Chapter 3). In both aspects, the book can be characterized as a trend-follower rather than a trend-setter: Theoretically, it sets forth the trend of the public administration turn in EU studies (Trondal 2007); empirically, the study not only rests on the assumptions of Hooghe’s (2001) study of the Commission but also studies the same group of management-level Commission officials, albeit the population 10 years later.