The Commissioner vs the states: responsiveness and responsibility in European tax governance

ABSTRACTThe European Union is the only international organisation that has a parliament where taxation is debated and legislated on. Along with foreign affairs and defense, however, taxation is also one of the few policy areas that is subject to unanimity voting among member-states. This creates a responsiveness-responsibility dilemma that the European Commission has tried to navigate by constructing responsiveness to public demands for tax justice as a political imperative. In this article, I apply the concept of ‘political work' to analyse EU tax policy between 2014 and 2019 and show the ways in which the politics of responsiveness partly eroded the institutional constraints of responsibility vis-à-vis member states. As I document, the Commission’s political work was initially successful but then lost momentum, as a handful of governments managed to veto efforts in the Council and push the issue to the OECD, where it was stalled by the United States until the election of Joe Biden.KEYWORDS: European Unionglobal corporate taxationdigital taxationtax evasionpolitical work AcknowledgmentsA first version of this paper was presented at the two ‘Responsibility and Responsiveness in EU Economic Governance’ workshops organised at the Université libre de Bruxelles in September 2022 and February 2023. The author would like to thank the organisers of the workshop and special issue (Amandine Crespy, Tiago Moreira Ramalho, and Vivien Schmidt) as well as the discussants (Lucy Kinsky, Cornel Ban) and two anonymous reviewers commissioned by the Journal of European Public Policy for their constructive comments. Above all, he is grateful to the Commission officials who agreed to be observed and answer his numerous questions over the course of almost five years.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 I thank a reviewer for helping me clarify this point.2 I thank a reviewer for alerting me to this window of opportunity.Additional informationNotes on contributorsFrédéric MérandFrédéric Mérand is Professor of Political Science at Université de Montréal. He has published ‘Political work in the stability and growth pact’, Journal of European Public Policy 29(6): 846–864.