Transposition of EU Directives in Central and Eastern Europe

Session 1: Governance in the European Unio

Between politics and administration : compliance with EU Law in Central and Eastern Europe

Countries that wish to join the European Union (EU) need to implement all existing EU laws before they are admitted as full members. Since the body of EU law comprises more than 80 000 pages and more than 2 000 directives, the adoption of EU law is a truly formidable task for any government. How have the eight countries from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) that joined the EU in 2004 coped with this requirement of the enlargement process? Surprisingly, this thesis reveals that these post-communist states have been quite successful in adopting the EU directives. Moreover, there is interesting variation in the performance of the new member states with some countries, like Lithuania, doing particularly well, while other, like the Czech Republic, having more problems than average. The thesis argues that the general success of the process of legal adaptation to EU laws in CEE can be largely explained by the conditionality of the enl argement process (EU entry is only possible if and when the condition of implementing the EU rules is fulfilled). Combing statistical methods and case studies in three policy fields (electronic communications, nature protection, and social policy), the thesis concludes that the varying implementation performance in different countries and policy sectors can be explained by reference to the CEE governments’ level of support for the process of European integration, their administrative capacities and the threat of financial sanctions for non-implementation of the EU rules after accession.LEI Universiteit LeidenThe politics and administration of institutional chang

Does euroscepticism influence compliance and enforcement of EU law in the member states?

NWOVENI-451-11-023The politics and administration of institutional chang

The relationship between age and happiness varies by income

The link between age and happiness has been the subject of numerous studies. It is still a matter of controversy whether the relationship is U-shaped, with happiness declining after youth before bouncing back in old age, or not. While the effect of age has been examined conditional on income and other socio-demographic variables, so far, the interactions between age and income have remained insufficiently explored. Using data from the European Social Survey, this article shows that the nature of the relationship between age and happiness varies strongly with different levels of relative income. People in the lowest decile of the income distribution experience a ‘hockey stick’: a deep decline in self-reported happiness until around age 50–55 and a small bounce back in old age. The classic U-curve is found mostly in the middle-income ranks. For people at the top of the income distribution, average happiness does not vary much with age. These results demonstrate the important role of income in moderating the relationship between age and happiness.The politics and administration of institutional chang

Als de rechtsstaat op het spel staat, steunen veel mensen sancties, zelfs tegen hun eigen staat

De EU heeft Polen financiële sancties opgelegd wegens problemen met de onafhankelijkheid van de rechterlijke macht. De sancties bedragen meer dan € 300 miljoen en het bedrag blijft groeien. Hoe worden de sancties door de Poolse bevolking ervaren? Worden ze als gerechtvaardigd en aanvaardbaar beschouwd?The politics and administration of institutional chang

Standing up for democracy? Explaining citizens’ support for democratic checks and balances

Winners and losers of elections have different stakes in protecting democratic institutions. We provide new evidence for the effects of partisanship and economic performance on support for checks and balances and acceptance of their infringement. Using survey data from 26 European countries, we show that voters who feel close to a political party that lost the elections support checks and balances significantly more than other citizens. We also find that higher satisfaction with the economy is associated with lower support for checks and balances. Our experiment in Ukraine shows that supporters and opponents of the governing party have divergent evaluations of a reform potentially infringing on the independence of the judiciary. Those in opposition find such reforms less acceptable and justified. Again, we find that improved economic performance leads to higher acceptance of judicial reform. Our results confirm that citizens’ support for checks and balances is contingent and volatile.Leiden University Fund/Gratama (W-19350-7-01)The politics and administration of institutional chang

Post-Accession Transposition and Implementation between Administrative Coordination and Political Bargaining.

The politics and administration of institutional chang

How to estimate the policy preferences of party supporters: disaggregating data from voting advice applications versus modeling survey responses

Valid and reliable estimates of the policy preferences of political parties' supporters are essential for the study of political representation. However, such estimates are not directly available from standard surveys of public opinion, which are typically representative by design only at the national level and rarely ask questions about public support for specific policies. In this article, we explore the possibility to use data from voting advice applications (VAA) to estimate the policy preferences of party supporters. To do that, first, we identify 10 questions on preferences towards issues of public policy that were asked around the same time and with similar wording in traditional surveys of public opinion and in VAAs fielded in Germany and in the Netherlands. Then we compare the VAA data disaggregated by political affiliation of the respondents to the survey data adjusted via multilevel regression modeling with poststratification (MRP). We find strong positive correlations between the estimates derived from both methods, especially after weighting the VAA data. Yet, point estimates are not always very close, and the match is sensitive to the treatment of neutral and ‘don't know’ answers. Overall, our results bode well for the validity of using VAA data in empirical research on political representation.NWOVIDI 452-12-008The politics and administration of institutional chang

Does the election winner–loser gap extend to subjective health and well-being?

Political scientists have studied extensively the gap between winners and losers of democratic elections with regard to satisfaction with democracy. We ask whether the winner–loser gap extends beyond the political domain to subjective health and well-being as well. Building on insights from biology and coalitional psychology, we hypothesize that winning and losing elections could affect one’s outlook on life, happiness, and subjective health. We comprehensively test these theoretical propositions with cross-sectional data from the 2012 and 2018 waves of the European Social Survey. We document significant gaps between winners and losers with respect to measures of subjective personal well-being. To further probe the causal nature of these winner–loser effects, we trace changes in well-being following election wins and losses using a panel dataset from the Netherlands, where we find weaker supportive evidence. Overall, our results suggest that winning and losing democratic elections can have much wider-reaching consequences than previously recognized.The politics and administration of institutional chang

Government capacity, societal trust or party preferences: what accounts for the variety of national policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe?

European states responded to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 with a variety of public policy measures. In this article we ask what can account for this variation in policy responses, and we identify a number of factors related to institutions, general governance and specific health-sector related capacities, societal trust, government type, and party preferences as possible determinants. Using multivariate regression and survival analysis, we model the speed with which school closures and national lockdowns were imposed. The models suggest a number of significant and often counterintuitive relationships: more centralized countries with lower government effectiveness, freedom and societal trust, but with separate ministries of health and health ministers with medical background acted faster and more decisively. High perceived capacity might have provided false confidence to the governments, resulting in a delayed response to the early stages of the pandemic. Furthermore, more right-wing and authoritarian governments responded faster.The politics and administration of institutional chang