This book poses two pertinent questions: First, if a European Executive Order is emerging, how can we empirically see it? Second, if a European Executive Order is emerging, how can we explain everyday decision‐making processes within it? The goal of this book is twofold: First, it identifies key institutional components of an emergent European Executive Order. The nucleus of this Order 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 in ... More

This book poses two pertinent questions: First, if a European Executive Order is emerging, how can we empirically see it? Second, if a European Executive Order is emerging, how can we explain everyday decision‐making processes within it? The goal of this book is twofold: First, it identifies key institutional components of an emergent European Executive Order. The nucleus of this Order 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 behaviour, role perceptions, and identities among European civil servants who participate within these institutions. In addition, this book reveals how an emergent European Executive Order profoundly penetrates the domestic branch of executive government. 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 evolving within an emergent European Executive Order is conditioned by the formal organization of its composite parts and by the social interaction patterns that emerge among the civil servants. Political processes and political systems can neither be adequately understood nor explained without including the organization dimension(s) of executive orders.