New book by professor Jarle Trondal

Professor Jarle Trondal has published a new book called An Emergent European Executive Order.

The book is intended for scholars and students of political science and those interested in the European Union, international relations, political institutions, and public administration.

More information at Oxford University Press.

Professor Trondal works at the Department of Political Science and Management and is one of the core faculty members at the PhD programme in Public Administration.

About the book

This book explores the building blocks of an emergent European Executive Order. Particular focus is directed towards the role of the European Commission, the EU-level agencies and webs of EU committees. This volume adds insights with respect to the prospects for the co-existence of multiple, overlapping, co-evolving and conflicting governance dynamics within an emergent European Executive Order, to the emergence of multilevel administrative systems that challenge existing patterns of democratic steering and accountability, to the concurrent existence of administrative co-ordination and fragmentation, and to actor-level identity and role change among European civil servants. The book demonstrates that an emergent European Executive Order is driven by the formal organisation of its component institutions, that the autonomy of the Commission and EU-level agencies is organisationally conditioned, that administrative systems at a domestic level and within EU institutions are partially integrated through collegial bodies represented by the web of EU committees, and that the external penetration and differentiated impact of EU-level institutions on domestic public administration are substantially filtered by domestic institutions, administrative cultures, traditions and histories.

The book argues that the creation of institutions within an emergent European Executive Order does not start from ‘a blank slate’ (Pierson 2004: 151). Institutions tend to come about through power struggles and compromises conditioned by existing institutional orders rather than emerging more or less automatically as a pure codification of functional needs or demands from the environment. The institutions that make up the European Executive Order are strongly embedded within larger institutional settings, and this setting may serve as an important source of both resilience and opportunity in their making and in their functioning.

This book adds two new important steps to our understanding of compound executive orders:

• Firstly, by arguing and empirically demonstrating that an emergent European Executive Order consists of a limited set of co-existing decision-making dynamics: supranational, departmental, epistemic and intergovernmental dynamics.
• Secondly, by suggesting causal mechanisms that may explain why certain dynamics gain prevalence in certain situations.

Essentially, the nuts and bolts of an emergent European Executive Order are ultimately determined by how trade-offs between behavioural dynamics are handled by individual government officials in everyday decision making as well as in periods of institutional creation, reformation and dismantling (Wilson 1989: 327). The presence of executive ‘orders’ does not suggest integrated and coherent orders consisting of perfectly-integrated and monolithic institutions and dynamics. Executive orders do not typically ‘hang together’, exhibiting coherence and predictability. Instead, different components of executive orders tend to overlap, counteract, layer and sometimes be out of synch rather than being integrated, co-ordinated and ‘ordered’ (Orren and Skowronek 2004).

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