Lost in Translation or Full Steam Ahead
| Author | Michael Kaeding |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116507085959 |
| Published date | 01 March 2008 |
| Date | 01 March 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Lost in Translation or Full
Steam Ahead
The Transposition of EU Transport
Directives across Member States
Michael Kaeding
European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA), The Netherlands
ABSTRACT
This study supplements extant literature on implementation
in the European Union (EU). The quantitative analysis,
which covers the EU transport
acquis
, reveals five main
findings. First, the EU has a transposition deficit in this area,
with almost 70% of all national legal instruments causing
problems. Second, transposition delay is multifaceted. The
results provide strong support for the assertion that dis-
tinguishing between the outcomes of the transposition
process (on time, short delay or long delay) is a useful
method of investigation. Third, factors specific to European
directives (level of discretion and transposition deadline)
and domestic-level factors (national transposition package
and number of veto players) have different effects on the
length of delay. Furthermore, the timing of general elections
in member states as well as policy (sub)sector-related
accidents influence the timeliness of national transposition
processes.
115
European Union Politics
DOI: 10.1177/1465116507085959
Volume 9 (1): 115–143
Copyright© 2008
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi
and Singapore
KEY WORDS
better regulation
directive
European Commission
gold-plating
transport
transposition
Introduction
Although full implementation of EU legislation is enshrined in the treaties
and is necessary to meet the Lisbon goals in 2010, most member states do not
live up to this obligation fully. In 2006 more than 770 notifications were still
pending and coincided with new European Court of Justice (ECJ) record
fines.1The question is why some member states refuse to comply with EU
law despite the image-marring effect in later EU negotiations and costly
consequences in both pecuniary and legal terms. As if this were not puzzling
enough, existing EU implementation studies have left the research
community with some gloomy inconsistencies. A considerable number of
studies lack empirical and conceptual strengths (Mastenbroek and Kaeding,
2006) and do not draw on earlier findings such as the implementation
literature of the 1970s or recent scholarly efforts in the field to improve
quantitative data.
This contribution aims to unravel the EU implementation puzzles while
focusing on the time aspect of national transposition processes of European
directives across member states, which represents a particularly salient form
of non-compliance (Mastenbroek, 2003; Berglund et al., 2006). The paper’s
research questions are as follows: Why do member states miss deadlines when
transposing EU internal market directives? What factors determine delays
when transposing EU directives?
In the following, I argue that national transposition can be understood
in terms of bargaining processes about who gets what and when. I see the
national transposition outcome as a negotiation between bureaucratic and
political transposition actors who must agree, within an allotted time frame,
on a new national policy complying with EU law. Who ends the game and
when depends on the players’ expected payoff. The expected flows of payoffs
to an actor equal the difference between benefits and costs. Moreover, the
costs of the new policies are not equally distributed among the actors, who
may then engage in a war of attrition as they attempt to redistribute or simply
delay the realization of these costs (Alesina and Drazen, 1991). Eventually,
three sets of explanatory factors for the timeliness of national transposition
processes that influence the cost/benefit structure of the actors can be ident-
ified combining legal and administrative as well as political factors: factors
specific to EU directives, factors related to the domestic level and crisis-related
multipliers. Whereas the European-level indicators relate to the policy design
(the directive’s level of discretion and the transposition deadline), national
factors stem from the process of implementation (national transposition
package and number of veto players). Crisis-related factors (timing of general
elections and policy (sub)sector-related accidents) stand on their own.
European Union Politics 9(1)
116
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