‘It’s the Bureaucracy, Stupid’

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. Notwithstanding these rather uniform pressures emerging from conditionality, 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 arrangements 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 accession has been a question of bureaucratic problems rather than of political veto-manoeuvres.

Europeanisation in new member and candidate states

“…In line with a prominent argument in the literature of compliance with EU law among the member states (for an overview, see Treib 2006;Hille and Knill 2006) suggest that the alignment of candidate countries might not simply depend on their domestic adjustments costs, but on their administrative capacities. Toshkov (2008Toshkov ( , 2009) provides evidence that both government capacities and political preferences have a strong effect on the transposition of EU law in the candidates.…”

“…Some more recent studies also emphasise the importance of administrative capacities. Hille and Knill (2006) argue that variation in the pace of legislative alignment with the EU's acquis communautaire among the candidate countries did not so much depend on veto players in the legislative process, but on administrative capacities. Toshkov (2008Toshkov ( , 2009) finds that both political preferences and government capacity had an effect on the transposition of EU directives in the eight CEECs that joined the EU in 2004.…”

Implementing and complying with EU governance outputs

“…Quantitative scholars could also invest more energy in finding better data sources on compliance, especially on the completeness and substantive correctness of transposition. For example, Zhelyazkova andTorenvlied (2009, 2011) [see also Zhelyazkova 2013] extracted information on compliance with individual provisions of directives from transposition reports prepared by the Commission and NGOs, Hille and Knill (2006) analysed the Commission's progress reports in order to assess candidate countries' alignment with the acquis, and Mäder (2013, 2014) asked law school graduate students to assess the legal correctness of domestic transposition measures. Although data sources such as these might not always be available, involve cumbersome coding procedures and, in the case of Commission monitoring reports, may be ridden with similar problems of Commission bias as infringement data, they could nevertheless be used more systematically in order to shed more light on the substantive rather than the temporal aspect of legal compliance.…”

“…Administrative capabilities involve various aspects. The first is administrative capacity or efficiency, which was shown to facilitate transposition by Mbaye (2001), Falkner et al (2004Falkner et al (2005: 302-303); Berglund et al (2006); Hille and Knill (2006);Kaeding (2006);Haverland and Romeijn (2007);Linos (2007); Perkins and Neumayer (2007);Toshkov (2007c);Berglund (2009);Knill and Tosun (2009);Börzel et al (2010Börzel et al ( , 2012; König and Mäder (2013);and Spendzharova and Versluis (2013), while no effect could be established by Thomson (2007Thomson ( , 2009Thomson ( , 2010 and König and Mäder (2014). The second aspect is administrative experience with transposing EU law, a factor that involves learning effects of sectoral administrations that become more and more acquainted with EU law the longer their sector is affected by EU directives, which was confirmed as an important explanatory factor by Berglund et al (2006); Kaeding (2006);Berglund (2009);Steunenberg and Rhinard (2010);and Haverland et al (2011).…”

“…Among the few factors that seemed to find support in several quantitative analyses in the third wave are the various aspects of administrative capabilities such as administrative capacity (Mbaye 2001;Berglund et al 2006;Hille and Knill 2006;Kaeding 2006;Haverland and Romeijn 2007;Linos 2007;Perkins and Neumayer 2007;Berglund 2009;Knill and Tosun 2009;Börzel et al 2010) or administrative experience with transposing EU law (Berglund et al 2006;Kaeding 2006;Berglund 2009;Steunenberg and Rhinard 2010;Haverland et al 2011).…”