Complying with Transposition Commitments in Poland: Collective Dilemmas, Core Executive and Legislative Outcomes

Abstract

This article examines the transposition of EU legislation in Poland before accession. It finds that the extent to which the Polish government complied with transposition commitments in a timely manner was related to the institutionalisation of rules that the domestic core executive could use to extend selective incentives and monitoring to ministers and departments. The effect of the core executive variable is contextualised by the impact of EU incentives, party configurations and ministerial resources. The article concludes by considering the wider significance of the core executive variable in research on compliance in the EU member states.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dr Klaus Goetz and two anonymous referees for their useful comments on an earlier draft of the article. The preliminary findings from this article were presented at the EGPA Conference on the European Administrative Space: Governance in Diversity in Potsdam in September 2002 and the 2nd ECPR Conference in Marburg, Germany in September 2003. I would like to thank the participants of these conferences for their helpful comments.

Notes

The author would like to thank politicians and civil servants who agreed to be interviewed in a total of 60 interviews conducted in Warsaw and Brussels between June 2001 and March 2004. Additional data was collected with permission at the open access archives of the Office of the Committee for European Integration and the Prime Minister's Chancellery.

Admittedly, this choice is not without problems. The precision of the transposition deadlines as well as the quality of the information on what transposing measures would be adopted varied both across policy areas and across programmes. The problem was addressed by limiting the focus of the analysis only to parliamentary legislation and by selecting measures that were clearly identified by name and deadline. Excluded from the selection were (i) measures with no deadlines (ii) measures which had been passed before the date of the programme, and (iii) measures with deadlines dependent on an external event. Also, only deadlines for cabinet adoption were used. Another problem with the data arose because the NPAA programmes were adopted in mid-year and, although they planned transposition for one and a half years, were updated in yearly cycles. As a result, there was an overlap of around six months and deadlines for many measures were provided simultaneously in two consecutive programmes. The problem was solved by selecting only the transposing measures that were scheduled for adoption only during the half-year period until the end of the year in which the programme was adopted.