Comitology: Little procedures with big implications

Comitology refers to a collection of procedures by which various committees of national experts moderate the Commission's powers of implementation under EU legislation. These procedures establish the rules which inform front‐line administrative operations and embrace a dimension of the implementation activity which has been largely ignored by the academic literature. The nature and incidence of the comitology procedure seriously challenge the notions of competence transfer and national interest which inform the key debates in integration theory. Comitology suggests a complexity and issue specificity to Union politics which confound the institutional determinism of both neo‐functionalism and neo‐realism, and support more recent integration theory derived from public management and international political economy which concentrate on policy outcomes, rather than institutional processes.