Andreea Nastase’s book “Public Ethics at the European Commission: Politics, Reform and Individual Views” (Routledge, 2016) investigates how Commission officials think about questions of integrity and ethical behaviour in public office. With a focus on the administrative services, it demonstrates that the Commission has practiced ethics regulation as a form of reputation management, where the purpose has been to handle public perceptions and strengthen itself against increasingly aggressive scrutiny from the European Parliament, the press, and watchdog-type NGOs. While internally this has resulted in a heightened awareness and discussion of ethical issues among staff, it has also led to ethics being widely characterized as a matter of "common sense", which denotes sceptical attitudes towards the relevance and usefulness of ethics measures in officials’ day-to-day work. Owing to the innovative use of vignettes, the monograph reveals for the first time how individual Commission officials think about issues of public integrity, and how they reason through ethical dilemmas at work. It advances a new angle to the study of the Commission as an administrative actor, and thus speaks to a broader literature on institutional reform and democratic legitimacy in the European Union. Andreea’s book builds upon and further develops empirical research gathered during her PhD at CEU (class of 2013, supervised by Prof. Agnes Batory).
link to the book: https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138203785