Administrative Convergence Actually — An Assessment of the European Commission’s Best Practices for Transposition of EU Legislation in France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Greece

Abstract

In light of the mid‐term review of the European Union’s Lisbon strategy, the study’s general concern is to explore how member states have converged around the European Commission’s administrative best practices for the transposition of EU legislation. Embedded in the broader institutional change literature and the Europeanization literature in particular, this study examines the Europeanization of public administration in five member states. It evaluates whether national administrative settings in France, Germany, Sweden, Greece and Italy have converged around the most efficient solution to the European transposition problem. The study finds new evidence for converging tendencies towards the recommended administrative model in the EU. Since 2004, developments in member states show that national coordination models for transposition have been adjusted, coordination mechanisms created, and special processes and procedures in line with the Commission’s recommended best practices established. Transposition data from 1995 to 2006, however, display that the EU’s transposition problem does not seem to be solved yet, which puts the use of European Commission recommendations and the Lisbon strategy more generally at stake.

Key Words:

• Administrative convergence
• Europeanization
• transposition
• neo‐institutionalism

Acknowledgement

This research would have been impossible without the civil servants of national ministries who were willing to give generously of their time for interviews. Furthermore, I would like to thank colleagues at the Department of Public Administration at Leiden University for their support and feedback. Financial support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NOW) is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. Note that you can think about convergence in a ‘broad’ and in a ‘strict’ sense. In the strict sense one can speak of convergence if a decrease in the dissimilarities between cases over time is observable. In a broader sense, one can speak of convergence if considerable similarities between cases are observable. In the following, this study will ask the question of ‘whether there is convergence’ in both senses of the term.

2. Next to information about the background and legal base of the Commission proposal, the fiche includes an assessment of the impact of the proposal on the French legal order, the relevance of the proposal to France and the initial position of the government, based on the discussions between the line ministries and the SGCI, on the proposal.