Leaving it to the experts? The EU institutional partners, the European Supervisory Authorities and the Binding Technical Standards regime

Griffiths, Dilwyn Paul (2025) Leaving it to the experts? The EU institutional partners, the European Supervisory Authorities and the Binding Technical Standards regime. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

In 2010, following the Global Financial Crisis, the European Union created three new European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs) and a specialised form of delegated legislation for financial services regulation – Binding Technical Standards. These standards are intended to be confined to genuinely technical topics rather than policy or strategic issues. Although drafted by the ESAs, they require adoption by the Commission which can amend or reject them, subject to following various procedures. The more significant standards can also be vetoed by either co-legislator. However, the framework legislation specified that such ESA standards should be amended only in very restricted and extraordinary circumstances. This has not proved to be the case. The Commission, European Parliament and individual Member States have regularly intervened in the standards-making process. They use their formal control powers to amend or veto ESA standards but also commonly exert informal pressure on the ESAs during standards drafting to pursue their policy preferences. The dissertation seeks to explain this puzzle. It does so by investigating all three stages of the process: the framework legislation negotiations; the decisions on delegated legislative empowerments; and the standards making itself. It finds evidence supporting the hypothesis that the primary reason is the institutional partners’ concern to maximise their control (or control and discretion in the Commission’s case) over this delegated legislative process. However, their stances were also influenced and conditioned by the institutional and conjunctural contexts in which they were operating, including decisions made in earlier phases of the regime. Technical standards increasingly became used for salient topics which inevitably meant that they attracted political attention. The study is therefore relevant to debates about the balance between technocratic expertise and democratic politics both in the EU and more widely, providing an informative case history of how and why political intervention occurs in supposedly expert processes.

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