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Przegląd Europejski – European Studies Quarterly

Position of OLAF in a multi-level governance system of the European Union

2019, 2019, No. 3

Janusz Ruszkowski

0000-0002-4786-7416

University of Szczecin (Szczecin, Poland), Instytut Politologii i Europeistyki

DOI

10.5604/01.3001.0013.5844

Publication date

19.11.2019

Publishing model

open access

License type

CC BY 4.0 Int.

Field

Social sciences

Discipline

international relations, economics and finance, communication and media studies, political science and public administration, management and quality studies, law, sociology

Language of publication

English, Polish

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Abstract

The author aims to investigate the position of OLAF in the multi-level governance system (MLG) of the European Union with specific inter-institutional consequences of such location, assuming that OLAF is not a classical supranational institution. In the research subject an important role is played by the European Commission (EC), which established OLAF and gave it specific competences to act. These facts are fundamentally important for further considerations, so they can have a major impact on the precise determination of OLAF’s position in the MLG. If OLAF as an agent and supervisor has control powers over supranational institutions, including its principal, a supranational European Commission, it is unlikely that it would also be a supranational institution. This article demonstrates, that OLAF is not a classic supranational institution because it exhibits strong features of a supra-supranational institution operating in a multi-level EU governance system. A helpful theoretical and methodological research tools we consider the Principal/Agent Theory (PAT) and its combination Principal/Supervisor/Agent Theory (PSAT) on the one hand, and the concept of multi-level governance (MLG) on the other hand.

Keywords:

OLAF,multi-level governance,supra-suprantional level,European Union

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