Providing information and building capacity: interest group involvement in the application of EU law

<p>Practical implementation has attracted significant scholarly attention in the European Union in the last decade, and the EU compliance literature started to focus more on the players in the domestic arena to help understand the application of EU law. However, a systematic analysis on interest group activities at the application stage is yet to be conducted. Relying on enforcement and management approaches, this article argues that interest groups act as providers of legal and technical information that are needed for correct application of EU law. Also, interest groups actively demand information from political actors to build internal capacity during this period. The results show that interest groups act as providers of information, but only in the national political arena. Moreover, motivation to learn is another factor that explains the level of access seeking during application, and this type of interaction takes place in both European and national venues.</p

The impact of interest group diversity on legal implementation in the European Union

<p>Do interest groups have an impact on transposition of European Union (EU) directives? This paper offers an analysis of interest group communities of member states and links the concept of diversity to legal implementation. In order to accommodate diverse interests, member state governments allow for some deviations when transposing EU legislation into national law. Therefore, successful transposition is hard to achieve in member states with diverse interest group environments. This paper tests this argument by applying a large N study including 19 directives and 15 member states. The results show that correct transposition is likely to be negatively affected by high levels of diversity of national interest groups; however, this effect is conditional on the discretion granted to member states by EU legislation.</p

Decoupling practical and legal compliance: Analysis of member states’ implementation of EU policy

Contains fulltext : 173666.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)Despite the vast literature on policy implementation, systematic cross-national research focusing on implementers’ performance regarding different policy issues is still in its infancy. The European Union policies are conducive to examining this relationship in a comparative setting, as the EU member states need to implement various EU directives both legally and in practice. In this study, a first attempt is made to analyse the relationship between legal conformity and practical implementation and the conditions for practical deviations in 27 member states across issues from four policy areas (Internal Market, Environment, Justice and Home Affairs and Social Policy). In line with existing approaches to EU compliance, it is expected that the policy preferences of domestic political elites (‘enforcement’) affect their incentives to ‘decouple’ practical from legal compliance. Instead, administrative and institutional capacities (‘management’) and societal constraints (‘legitimacy’) are likely to limit the ability of policy makers to exert control over the implementation process. The findings suggest that practical deviations arise from policy makers’ inability to steer the implementation process, regardless of their predispositions towards internationally agreed policies. The results have strong implications for the effective application of international rules in domestic settings, as they illustrate that political support for the implementation of ‘external’ policy does not ensure effective implementation in practice

Notified and substantive compliance with EU law in enlarged Europe: evidence from four policy areas

<p>Whereas quantitative studies show that the ‘new’ EU entrants from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are the forerunners in the transposition of EU directives, case studies indicate the existence of a gap between legal and practical compliance. This study aims to reconcile these divergent findings by comparing member states’ performance regarding different compliance aspects: delayed transposition; legal and practical conformity. We address the following questions: Do we observe systematic variation in compliance (a) between different EU member states, (b) between different forms of compliance? To what extent do preference- and capacity-based factors explain differences in implementation between the EU-15 and the EU-10 states? Our analysis shows that the CEE member states are generally more efficient in transposing the EU rules than their Western counterparts. In addition and with the exception of social policy directives, the CEE member states do not lag behind the EU-15 countries with respect to practical implementation.</p