‘It’s the Bureaucracy, Stupid’
| Author | Christoph Knill,Peter Hille |
| Published date | 01 December 2006 |
| Date | 01 December 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1465116506069442 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
‘It’s the Bureaucracy, Stupid’
The Implementation of the
Acquis
Communautaire
in EU Candidate
Countries, 1999–2003
Peter Hille
University of Konstanz, Germany
Christoph Knill
University of Konstanz, Germany
ABSTRACT
The Central and East European (CEE) countries that had
applied for membership in the European Union were
confronted with far-reaching requirements in order to bring
domestic policies in line with EU standards. Notwithstand-
ing these rather uniform pressures emerging from condi-
tionality, there is considerable variety in alignment
performance across the candidate countries and over time.
To account for this, we use time series cross-sectional data
on the implementation performance of 13 EU candidate
countries between 1999 and 2003. Our results indicate that
the bureaucratic strength and effectiveness of a country
positively influence its ability to adjust domestic arrange-
ments to EU requirements. By contrast, we find no support
for veto-player theories of political constraints on legislative
change. We hence conclude that the implementation of the
acquis communautaire
in candidate countries prior to acces-
sion has been a question of bureaucratic problems rather
than of political veto-manoeuvres.
531
European Union Politics
DOI: 10.1177/1465116506069442
Volume 7 (4): 531–552
Copyright© 2006
SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks CA,
New Delhi
KEY WORDS
Europeanization
implementation
policy change
transformation countries
Introduction
Fundamental change has happened in large parts of Europe during the last
10 years. Those countries that had applied for membership of the European
Union (EU) during the 1990s have undergone transformation of unprece-
dented scope and speed in order to bring their economic and political struc-
tures in line with EU standards. This implied far-reaching reforms of
legislation, administration and macroeconomic policies. Most scholars agree
that this process has been driven by the conditionality of EU membership
and its prospective gains for the candidate countries (see Schimmelfennig
and Sedelmeier, 2004). However, the candidate countries1have not carried
out reforms at a steady pace and with equal success. Both between countries
and across time, variation has occurred in the implementation of the acquis
communautaire.
How can this variation in implementation performance be explained?
When looking at the growing body of literature on the implementation of EU
policies, it is difficult to come up with a clear answer to this question. This
results from two factors. First, we are confronted with competing theoretical
approaches in order to account for implementation effectiveness in the
member states. Although a number of studies emphasize the influence of
characteristics of the domestic administrative and legal system as well as their
compatibility with European requirements (see Duina, 1997; Knill and
Lenschow, 1998; Bailey, 2002), others point to the importance of institutional
and political constraints affecting the domestic capacity of corresponding
policy adjustments (see Haverland, 2000; Mbaye, 2001; Mastenbroek, 2003;
Versluis, 2004).
Second, this persistence of theoretical ambiguity partially results from the
lack of comprehensive empirical data. So far, there are only a limited number
of case studies that have investigated the formal and practical implementa-
tion of EU law with regard to certain policies and countries. More compre-
hensive quantitative studies, by contrast, primarily concentrate on the aspect
of formal transposition of EU law or infringement proceedings, where the
relevant data are easily available from Commission sources (albeit question-
able in terms of quality; see Börzel, 2001). Comprehensive theory-building is
thus primarily based on the analysis of formal implementation, although it
is highly debatable that this aspect constitutes a viable proxy for the effec-
tiveness of practical application.
In this paper, we try to address these problems. We derive hypotheses
from the differing theoretical arguments in order to test them empirically for
the implementation performance of EU candidate countries. In this context,
we investigate not only aspects of formal transposition but also the extent to
European Union Politics 7(4)
532
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