Customizing Europe: transposition as bottom-up implementation

ABSTRACT

European Union (EU) implementation research has neglected situations when member states go beyond the minimum requirements prescribed in EU directives (gold-plating). The top–down focus on compliance insufficiently accounts for the fact that positive integration actually allows member states to transcend the EU's requirements to facilitate context-sensitive problem-solving. This study adopts a bottom–up implementation perspective. Moving beyond compliance, it introduces the concept of ‘customization’ to depict how transposition results in tailor-made solutions in a multilevel system. The study analyses the hitherto unexplored veterinary drug regulations of four member states. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis and formal theory evaluation, this article assesses how policy and country-level factors interact. Results reveal the countries’ different customization styles. The latter simultaneously reflect the interplay of domestic politics with institutions, and the ‘fit’ of EU regulatory modes with domestic, sectoral interventionist styles. Compliance approaches cannot fully explain these fine-grained patterns of Europeanization.

KEY WORDS:

• Europeanization
• gold-plating
• qualitative comparative analysis
• theory evaluation
• transposition

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Jonas Buche, Andreas Corcaci, Sabine Jenni, Eva Lieberherr, Ellen Mastenbroek, Fritz Sager, Carsten Q. Schneider, all reviewers and discussants.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the Taylor & Francis website http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2015.1008554.

Notes

1 As opposed to indirect legal reform requirements (Treib 2014: 23–4).

2 For policies that cannot meaningfully be adopted without amendments, these numbers were slightly adapted to ensure cross-case comparability and account for fine-grained cross-country differences.

3 I hereafter interpret the term ‘typically’ as a consistent statement of sufficiency.

4 Directive 90/167/EEC was amended as the European Parliament (EP) and the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) without exemption urged for more precise rules, additional regulations, and more detailed definitions. The EP approved Directive 2001/82/EC without amendment; the EESC recommended to adopt current technical terminology. Commission Directive 2006/130/EC did not involve stakeholders (source: Eur-Lex).

5 Pearson's R for interventionist styles and customization restrictiveness: 0.47 (r² = 0.22); COERC and CUSTOM: 0.30 (r² = 0.092).

Additional information

Biographical note

Eva Thomann is a public policy analyst at the Center of Competence for Public Management at the University of Bern, Switzerland.