An Emergent European Executive Order

ISBN-13: 9780199579426 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 320 str.

Jarle Trondal

Opis

This book poses two pertinent questions: If a European executive order is emerging, how can we empirically see it? And if a European executive order is emerging, how can we explain everyday decision-making processes within it? The goal of this book is to identify key institutional components of an emergent European executive order, the nucleus of which is the European Commission. The Commission, however, is increasingly supplemented by a mushrooming parallel administration of EU-level agencies and EU committees. This book provides fresh empirical survey and interview data on the everyday decision-making behavior, role perceptions, and identities among European civil servants who participate within these institutions.
Secondly, this book claims and empirically substantiates that an emergent European executive order is a compound executive order balancing a limited set of key decision-making dynamics. One message of this book is that an emergent European executive order consists of a compound set of supranational, departmental, epistemic, and intergovernmental decision-making dynamics. Arguably, a compound European executive order transforms the inherent Westphalian order to the extent that intergovernmentalism is transcended and supplemented by a multidimensional mix of supranational, departmental and/or epistemic dynamics. This book also theoretically explores conditions under which these decision-making dynamics gain prevalence. It is argued that the decision-making dynamics emerging within an emergent European executive order are conditioned by the formal organization of its composite parts and by the patterns of social interaction that emerge among its civil servants. Political processes and political systems can neither be adequately understood nor explained without including the organizational dimension of executive orders.

Recenzje

there can be no doubt that An Emergent Executive Order is poised to make a significant contribution to European public administration as well as to debates about the Europeanisation of domestic executives. It brings intriguing data to light about variation in officials perceptions and behaviour, and it points to future avenues of research that will incite scholars to explore the subject in even more depth.

O autorze

Professor Jarle Trondal is Professor in public administration at University of Agder, department of political science and management (Norway), and also Professor at ARENA - Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo (Norway). He holds a PhD in political science from University of Oslo, department of political science (2001). He has previously held the position as senior researcher at NIFU STEP, researching the internationalisation of research and higher education. His research is centred on the comparative study of international bureaucracies as well as the emergent European executive order. Recent publications appear in Governance, Public Administration, West European Politics, European Journal of Political Research, and Journal of European Public Policy.