ABSTRACT
Introduction How institutional conflicts arise in international political orders and the conditions shaping the outcomes of such conflicts have become the object of considerable contemporary focus. In a world where political decision making increasingly takes place above the level of the nation-state, tensions between different levels are becoming ever more pronounced. These dynamics are perhaps most clearly manifested in the European Union, one of the most highly integrated international political orders on the globe. Political decisions taken within the framework of the EU have wide-ranging implications in both national and international settings. With deeper integration in a seemingly ever-expanding catalogue of policy issues, the distribution of decision-making competencies across organizational entities has become increasingly salient. This general problematique is addressed by theorizing the social mechanisms that help us better understand at which point these tensions become explicit. It explains the turn from day-to-day functioning of international political orders to outright conflict between organizational entities representing different levels of decision making. It also engages with questions regarding what happens after the outbreak of institutional conflicts, and explains the dynamics of such conflicts and how they may contribute to shifts in the distribution of decision-making competencies.
