Taking stock: a review of quantitative studies of transposition and implementation of EU law

This paper presents a literature review of all quantitative (statistical) studies of compliance with EU law. The paper introduces and makes use of a new online database http://www.eif.oeaw.ac.at/implementation/ which presents a detailed and comprehensive overview and classification of the existing quantitative research on transposition and implementation of EU directives in the member states. The study discusses and compares the different conceptualizations and operationalizations of compliance used, the list and specifications of the explanatory variables included in the models, the hypotheses proposed, and, most importantly, the findings of the literature. While the academic field has made progress in terms of assessing the scale and dimensions of the transposition failures in the EU, the causal inferences advanced in the existing literature are often weakly supported and sometimes contradictory when all studies are considered. The literature review suggests that only causal relationships that are specific for a certain time period, policy area, country, or type of legislation can be supported by empirical data, which means that broad generalizations about compliance in the EU might be impossible to uncover. The paper also suggests that decomposing the implementation process into its component stages, incorporating more rigorously the interactions between the Commission and the member states, and paying closer attention to the multilevel structure of the data in the statistical models can benefit future research on compliance in the EU.European law; European Commission; political science; implementation; directives; directives

Why it's not so simple to make the EU simpler

The EU's institutional architecture is often regarded as being too complex for citizens to properly engage with, and both Jean-Claude Juncker and Emmanuel Macron have recently proposed some form of simplification such as merging the President of the European Commission with the President of the European Council, or reducing the size of the European Commission. Dimiter Toshkov argues that while the EU is extraordinarily complex, efforts to simplify it are likely to come at the cost of either its inclusiveness or effectiveness

There is no evidence of a structural East-West divide in the EU

One of the most feared consequences of the EU’s eastern enlargement in the 2000s was that it would significantly diminish the decision-making capacity of the Union. As Dimiter Toshkov writes, several highly-publicised cases in which member states from Central and Eastern Europe have seemingly acted together to oppose proposals coming from Brussels have reinforced this pessimistic view. However, drawing on a recent study, he argues that there is no systematic evidence that the accession of the new member states has slowed down decision making nor compromised the capacity of the EU to adopt common policies

Mapping citizen preferences on European integration in a multidimensional political space

Previous research suggests that citizens located on the extremes of the left-right ideological spectrum are more likely to oppose European integration. Drawing on a new study, Dimiter Toshkov illustrates that when citizens are placed in a multidimensional political space, the relationship between Euroscepticism and other dimensions varies in more complex ways

Embracing European Law: Compliance with EU Directives in Central and Eastern Europe

Accession to the European Union (EU) demands the adoption of a vast body of legislation. This paper analyses compliance with EU directives in eight post-communist countries during the Eastern enlargement and tries to account for the puzzling embrace of EU law in Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on a new data set tracking the transposition of a sample of 119 directives, the paper finds effects of both political preferences and government capacity on the likelihood of timely transposition. Furthermore, important sectoral differences are uncovered, with trade-related legislation having a better chance and environmental legislation having a significantly worse chance of being incorporated into national legal systems on time. Beyond the conditionality of the accession process, the paper unveils a complex causal structure behind the ups and downs in transposition performance

The EU is extraordinarily complex. But do we want to simplify it?

The EU's institutional architecture is often regarded as being too complex for citizens to properly engage with, and both Jean-Claude Juncker and Emmanuel Macron have recently proposed some form of simplification - such as merging the President of the European Commission with the President of the European Council, or shrinking the Commission. Dimiter Toshkov argues that while the EU is extraordinarily complex, ..

Transposition of EU Directives in Central and Eastern Europe

Session 1: Governance in the European Unio

Connecting the Dots: Case Studies and EU Implementation Research

This paper is an accompanying text to the Compliance Database – the database of case studies of transposition, implementation, and compliance with EU law. (stract http://www.eif.oeaw.ac.at/compliance/). The database contains the results from the literature survey in a form that enables detailed overviews of individual studies as well as easy comparisons across studies. The database has been developed with the support of the Institute for European Integration Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and it is a free and regularly updated resource. The conclusions of this paper are based as much on the inferences that the database offers, as on the original articles and books that have been reviewed.implementation; political science

Evidence from the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood.

This paper explores what factors might influence citizen preferences for closer cooperation with the EU and/or Russia in three countries from the EU's Eastern neighbourhood: Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine. The citizens in these countries have been exposed to competing narratives and policy frames, advanced by both the EU and Russia, about the purposes and effects of closer cooperation. We first develop theoretical ideas about the potential influence of framing on public attitudes towards international cooperation. We then study these ideas empirically using a survey experiment in which six different frames about international cooperation are embedded in short vignettes. The frames highlight themes such as economy, security, values or identity and were developed based on previous research on factors that influence preferences on international cooperation. The experiment was implemented among a diverse and relatively large sample of citizens in the three countries. Our main conclusions are that thematic neutral frames of international cooperation have only very limited potential to influence directly people’s support for cooperation with the EU, but might be more potent in affecting the beliefs of people about the effects of cooperation with different partners on desired outcomes, such as economic benefits, security, and good governance. These beliefs as such are strong predictors of the preferences for international cooperation partners. In addition to the results from this experimental study, we present an analysis of the relationship between the preferred media source of news for people and their preferences for international cooperation partners. Furthermore, we explore the correlates of support for cooperation with the EU with an emphasis on the potential importance of media use. We find that there are no strong differences in average levels of support for the EU among people who use different media sources to get trustworthy news, with the possible exception of Belarus

Timing is Everything? Organized Interests and the Timing of Legislative Activity

Different perspectives on the role of organized interests in democratic politics imply somewhat different temporal sequences in the relationship between legislative activity and the influence activities of organized interests. Unfortunately, a lack of data has greatly limited any kind of detailed examination of this sequence. We address this problem by taking advantage of the temporally very precise data on lobbying activity provided by the door pass system of the European Parliament (Berkhout and Lowery 2011). After reviewing the several different perspectives on the timing of lobbying and legislative activity, we present the data used in our analysis and then use them to consider the larger issue of what our findings can tell us about the role of organized interests in democratic politics and, more importantly, our theories of organized interests in the policy process