The EU leadership constellation: neither monist nor pluralist, but triarchical. An analysis of the profiles of the 300 dominant administrative and political positions in the EU institutions in 2021

In this article, we map the profiles of the 300 dominant political and administrative ‘top positions’ within the European Union institutions one and a half years after their appointment following the 2019 European elections. In doing so, this analysis aims to contribute to the state-of-the-art in EU politics and governance and to answer research questions at the crossroads of field theory, the sociology of elites and European integration theory. Based on the statistical analysis of various indicators of EU institutions’ leaders’ background and socio-professional career paths (including a Multiple correspondence analysis), the paper breaks with the dominant debate on eurocracy as a monist or pluralist elite to show that the EU institutions’ leadership constellation actually forms a triarchy between three groups that are quite balanced and, for two of them, more embedded in the European nation-states than might have been thought.