Are opinion polls used as politicized or de-politicized policy instruments? Or, when DG JUST and DG EMPL commission Eurobarometer surveys (2010-2019

In this paper, we suggest scrutinizing the political nature of polls by looking at the Eurobarometer surveys commissioned by the European Commission. The European Commission has been described at exercising a dual function inside European governance, providing executive government as well as public administration (Christiansen, 1997). Due to this dual function and the political role played both by the European Parliament and the EU 2 Council, the EC’s political nature has often been and is still very much discussed (Kassim et al., 2013 ; Wille, 2013 ; Nugent & Rhinard, 2019). As such, the EC could appear as a critical case to study the politicized or de-politicized use of polls by those who govern as we could expect the EC to be less eager to develop politicized uses than all other governmental bodies due to its very loosely link to elections. More specifically, our research focus on the commissioning of polls by two Directorate General (DG) of the European Commission, the DG for Justice and Consumers (DG JUST) and the DG for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion (DG EMPL), during two European Commission’s mandate, the Barroso II Commission, from 2009 to 2014, and the Juncker Commission, from 2014 to 2019. Based on this material, we investigate the instrumentation of Eurobarometer surveys by EC policymakers. What are they looking for when they commission polls and are their uses of the resort to citizens’ voices politicized or a politicized? Are we really in a “Moscovici-like” situation where DGs do commission Eurobarometer surveys3 without making a politicized use of them, or are there some forms of politicization in these processes. In order to answer this question, we propose first to present our data and methods, then to investigate the type of information policymakers are looking for when commissioning polls. More specifically, in the first section we will first describe our polls dataset then our classification and interviews. In the second section, we will focus of the different types of information, from different kinds of evaluative statements to preferences, collected through polls while aiming at understand Eurobarometers uses in the European decision-making process