Patterns of Transversal Governance

Patterns of Transversal Governance offers the first comprehensive comparative account of how modern states restructure policymaking to address increasingly complex, cross-sectoral public problems. Drawing on an original dataset covering 13 OECD countries and four major policy fields, environment, health, migration, and unemployment, between 1980 and 2014, the book shows how governments have progressively adopted reforms that integrate policy goals and coordinate administrative organizations across traditional sectoral boundaries. The book introduces transversal governance as a conceptual lens for understanding this structural transformation; it argues that policy integration and administrative coordination have become essential responses to two powerful forces reshaping contemporary governance: the denationalization of authority through delegation to supranational, international, and subnational bodies, and the growing fragmentation of the state driven by New Public Management and specialized agencies. These dynamics do not hollow out national governments but often trigger efforts to recenter political authority through cross-cutting reforms. Through a combination of large-N statistical analyses and in-depth case studies of the United Kingdom and France, the book uncovers the political and institutional mechanisms behind transversal reforms and demonstrates how multilevel governance, partisan motivations, and problem pressure drive transversal governance reforms that integrated policy instruments and coordinate administrative organizations. Offering a unified theoretical framework, rich empirical evidence, and clear implications for both scholarship and practice, Patterns of Transversal Governance provides a groundbreaking understanding of how states adapt to govern in an era of complexity, interdependence, and multilevel politics.Transformations in Governance is a major academic book series from Oxford University Press. It is designed to accommodate the impressive growth of research in comparative politics, international relations, public policy, federalism, and environmental and urban studies concerned with the dispersion of authority from central states to supranational institutions, subnational governments, and public-private networks. It brings together work that advances our understanding of the organization, causes, and consequences of multilevel and complex governance. The series is selective, containing annually a small number of books of exceptionally high quality by leading and emerging scholars.The series is edited by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Walter Mattli of the University of Oxford.This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.