‘As time goes by’: Explaining the transposition of maritime directives¹

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explain the speed with which Member States transpose EC directives in the maritime sector. By discussing earlier work, the focus is on explanatory factors related to the contents of the directive that needs to be transposed and the context within which national transposition takes place. The authors' expectations have been tested using data across seven Member States and 32 maritime directives. Using survival analysis based on Cox regression, several political‐administrative and legal factors are identified that have an impact on the speed of transposition. The political sensitivity of the directive and the total number of national implementing measures lengthens the duration of transposition, while the degree of specialisation of the directive, the use of package law and experience speed up transposition. The authors also find that the impact of some of these explanatory factors changes over time. This underscores the importance of taking time seriously and to explore time dependency in further theoretical work on explaining policy‐making processes.

Comparing transposition in the 27 member states of the EU: the impact of discretion and legal fit

“…The Cox model, which has been widely used in transposition research (see, for instance, Borghetto et al 2006;Steunenberg and Kaeding 2009;Thomson 2007), has the advantage of leaving the particular distributional form of duration time unspecified. This is helpful since current theorizing on transposition does not provide much insight into this pattern.…”

“…Steunenberg together with Kaeding and Rhinard (2009;) employ a directivespecific procedural veto player index that takes into account the decisionmaking level for the transposition measures and adjusts for the number of actors involved. Transposition patterns shed some support for the effect of this variable (Steunenberg and Kaeding 2009;Steunenberg and Rhinard 2006).…”

“…So far studies have focused either on the EU-15 member states (Falkner et al 2005;König and Luetgert 2009;Steunenberg and Kaeding 2009; Thomson et al 2007) or on the group of newcomers (EU-10) that joined in May 2004 (Falkner and Treib 2008;Toshkov 2008;Zubek 2008). This article gathers information on old and new member states (for the period after accession).…”

The transposition of European law in EU member states: between process and politics

“…First, the adoption of the first implementing instrument is an important step since it puts national transposition into motion. In a study on maritime directives by Steunenberg and Kaeding (2009), in which the data were based on expert assessment about which measures were needed to transpose a directive, in the bulk of the cases (74%) only a single measure was required for transposition. Second, the adoption of the first implementing instrument is taken as an indicator in other member states for the specific directive was used as an estimate (unless this average was longer than the observation period in weeks).…”

The role of subnational authorities in the implementation of EU directives

“…In the Netherlands, involvement delays transposition initially but accelerates it later (Mastenbroek 2003). However, in Italy (Borghetto, Franchino and Giannetti 2006) and in maritime policy (Steunenberg and Kaeding 2009) it behaves in the opposite way.…”