01499pab a2200169 454500008004000000100002200040245006200062260000900124300001500133362000800148520104600156650001601202650002601218650001901244700001401263773005201277180718b2012   xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d  aBauer, Michael W.  aPoliticization within the European Commission bureaucracy  c2012  ap.403-424.  aSep  aAgainst a background of institutional change and organizational reform, we analyze the politicization of the European Commissionﾒs bureaucracy. Politicization can generally be defined as the substitution of bureaucratic neutrality by introducing political considerations into the human resource management and behaviour of civil servants. The concepts of direct and professional politicization serve as vantage points for our analysis. The empirical data are taken from documentary analysis and recent online and semi-structured surveys of Commission officials. We show that Commission bureaucrats, although they are highly sensitive to the political side of their job, are less politicized since the Kinnock reforms than before. While the College of the Commission seems to have indeed become more politically responsive to its supranational peers and national governments, the Commissionﾒs bureaucracy can be characterized as weakly politicized or, according to current debates, as quite instrumental in a Neo-Weberian sense. - Reprodu  aBureaucracy  aAdministrative reform  aEuropean Union  aEge, Jorn  aInternational Review of Administrative Sciences