The rift between executive contraction and executive detraction: the case of European Commission battery policy-making

Providing policy solutions to solve across border societal challenges in Europe, such as electrifying the transport sector by facilitating a European battery industry, call for increased coordination among policy-makers. This article offers a novel study of the formulation of the European Commission’s (Commission’s) battery regulation proposal. In doing so, the paper makes two distinct contributions to extant literature: Theoretically, it outlines two conceptual models of executive governance – that of the Commission as a contracted and a detracted institution – and offers an institutional-organizational approach to account for conditions under which each of these models is likely to unfold. Empirically, the paper offers a case study of the process of drafting the Commission’s battery regulation proposal. Benefiting from semi-structured interviews, the study reveals patterns of executive contraction and detraction in the Commission. Whereas extant literature picture the Commission as an increasingly centralized and contracted executive institution, this study finds that executive contraction and detraction tend to co-evolve and co-exist.