The competence-control dilemma and the institutional design of European Union agencies

In the past decades, European Union (EU) agencies have proliferated to address a plethora of governance problems. When designing EU agencies, EU legislators confront a tension: Legislators want agencies to be competent problem-solvers, but they also want to keep agencies under control. How do EU legislators balance these two imperatives? We argue that agencies' political principals do not necessarily have to trade competence for control, and vice versa, but can draw on different institutional strategies – manipulating agencies' decision-making and decision-maker independence – to mitigate the competence-control dilemma. Drawing on an original dataset on EU agencies' formal independence, we demonstrate empirically that principals customize EU agencies' independence to match the respective competence and control demands that come with specific agency tasks: regulation, authorization, implementation and information. The paper makes an important contribution to the literature on the drivers of the EU's agencification and to debates on the institutional design of regulatory institutions in the EU and beyond.