Issue salience in the European policy process: what impact on transposition?

Abstract

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Implementing and complying with EU governance outputs

“…The best thing to shed more light into the impact of relative member state power would be to test for the effect of this factor in a study that either controls for the Commission's preferences or uses transposition data. The latter has been done by Spendzharova and Versluis (2013), but their analysis of notification data from the field of environmental policy did not reveal a significant effect of the power of member state governments on transposition outcomes.…”

“…Therefore, the effect o government left-right positions is mainly tested in sectoral studies, for example on social policy, where it has, however, often turned out to be insignificant Jensen (2007);Linos (2007);Toshkov (2007a,c). In a quantitative study on the transposition of environmental policy directives, in contrast, Spendzharova and Versluis (2013) could demonstrate that governments attaching high salience to environmental protection, and governments comprising Green parties, tend to transpose environmental directives faster. König and Luetgert (2009) have decided to go for a different operationalisation, which does not Living Reviews in European Governance http://www.livingreviews.org/lreg-2014-1 measure the partisanship of government but the diversity of (sector-specific) partisan preferences in the domestic arena.…”

“…Here, the picture is a bit more mixed, with many studies finding significant effects (Mastenbroek 2003;Borghetto et al 2006;Borghetto and Franchino 2010;Kaeding 2006Kaeding , 2008aLuetgert and Dannwolf 2009;Steunenberg and Rhinard 2010;König and Mäder 2013;Spendzharova and Versluis 2013), while a few others did not (Haverland and Romeijn 2007;Haverland et al 2011). This might be due to the differing scope of individual studies and to different statistical specifications.…”

“…In sum, what this type of operationalisation measures is not transposition performance but the speed with which member states take a first legislative step towards incorporating EU directives into their legal systems. To overcome this limitation, others have decided to take the last measure reported in Celex/EUR-Lex as the date at which the transposition process was completed (Toshkov 2007c(Toshkov , 2008Spendzharova and Versluis 2013).…”

“…Thus, the distinction between Commission directives and Council directives or directives of the Council and the European Parliament was used as a proxy for the significance of different pieces of legislation. Indeed, several studies showed Commission directives caused less trouble in transposition than Council or Council/EP directives, presumably because Commission directives are of a more technical nature and thus imply less wideranging reform requirements (Mastenbroek 2003;Borghetto et al 2006;Borghetto and Franchino 2010;Kaeding 2006Kaeding , 2008aSteunenberg and Rhinard 2010;Haverland et al 2011;Spendzharova and Versluis 2013).…”