Paper Titles & Abstracts

Research into the internal performance of the European Union (EU) necessitates the analysis of the member states' national statistical systems (NSSs). After all, the NSSs are in charge of collecting and providing the official statistics that determine a country's performance. With it they lay the basis for comparisons of performance among EU member states and enable the formulation and evaluation of EU policies. Yet how are the NSSs performing themselves and who is in charge of evaluating their performance within the European statistical system?This paper will address the governance of the Romanian and Slovenian NSSs and examine the impact of EU policies on them, paying particular attention to the 2011 Population and Housing Census. These NSSs have been selected for their differing levels of centralisation and the manner in which the census was taken. Both factors influence the number and the kind of actors involved, as well as the steering mechanisms they employ. While Romania operates a decentralised statistical system and a traditional census based on questionnaires, the Slovenian NSS is centralised and introduced a register-based census in 2011. Questions about the performance of both EU member states are closely linked to a successful Europeanisation of statistical governance. By drawing on historical institutionalism, this contribution will evaluate how each NSS has evolved over time and what impact EU accession had on the development of the institutional framework. A comparison of the member states will highlight the key issues that need to be addressed to potentially improve the EU's internal performance