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

Abstract

Analyses of agenda setting and decision making have highlighted that issue salience plays an important role in those stages of the policy process. This article investigates the role of issue salience in the implementation stage, focusing on transposition. We examine the extent to which issue salience – the relative importance attached to an issue in relation to others – influences the timeliness of transposing European Union directives in national legislation. We analyse 143 European Union environmental directives adopted in the period 1996–2008 in ten member states. We operationalize issue salience as the salience of hazardous substances and materials, salience for political parties in government and salience for the general public. Our results show faster transposition when environmental issues are salient for the governing political parties, Green political parties are included in the government, and the general public ranks environmental issues as a top priority.

Keywords:

• European Union policy process
• issue salience
• transposition of European Union law

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Andreas Lachenmaier provided outstanding research assistance, for which we are very grateful. The authors would also like to thank the participants and discussant Dimiter Toshkov of the panel ‘The Implementation of European Law’ at the ECPR General Conference in Potsdam (September 2009), as well as the participants and discussant Natalia Timus of the FASoS ‘Politics and Culture in Europe’ colloquium in Lisbon (June 2010) for their valuable comments. In addition, we thank Asya Zhelyazkova and Lucie Spanihelova for their thoughtful feedback on earlier versions of the article. We also thank the JEPP referees for their helpful comments.

Notes

The literature distinguishes between ‘formal’ or ‘legal’ implementation, which refers to updating the existing laws on the books, and ‘practical’ or ‘administrative’ implementation, which taps into the actual enforcement and use of the transposed legal instruments. We only have sufficient data to investigate ‘legal’ implementation, namely the transposition of EU environmental directives into national legislation.

Although Commission directives are generally speaking transposed faster, this does not tell us much about practical implementation. A case study of the practical implementation of Commission directive 91/155/EEC on Safety Data Sheets shows uncomplicated transposition (albeit late) but lacking practical implementation (see Versluis 2007).

Interview with two civil servants at the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, The Hague, The Netherlands, 29 June 2011.

EUR-Lex, although widely used in the literature, is based on self-reported data compiled by member states' administrations. Thus we cannot rule out the possibility of bias in the self-reported estimates of transposition timeliness.

We opted for constructing our own veto players index because existing indices do not cover all cases for the entire time period. Our index is weakly positively correlated with standard ones such as the Henisz index of political constraints (Spearman's rho 0.353).

The reported coefficient estimates in Table 3 are β_t = β₁ + β₂ × ln(t), where β₁ is the time-independent coefficient for a covariate, β₂ is the time-dependent coefficient, and ln(t) is the natural logarithm of time. The corresponding standard error of this term is calculated according to the formula:

Additional information

Biographical notes:

Aneta Spendzharova is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Maastricht University, The Netherlands.

Esther Versluis is Associate Professor of European Regulatory Governance at Maastricht University, The Netherlands.