![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Although human rights treaties offer neither positive nor negative incentives, a majority of EU member states fully comply with civil liberties. This article seeks to identify the conditions able to clarify this paradox. Current EU compliance research struggles to provide a comprehensive explanation since (a) there is a lack of studies on practical implementation and (b) it rarely takes into account policy-specificity. The author suggests that a two-level theory based on capability and willingness is a useful approach for analyzing practical implementation when complemented with policy-specific conditions. Using fuzzy-set analysis, the author confirms that capability, namely judicial capability, executive capability or democratic experience, and willingness, namely a solid system of checks and balances, a strong civil society and an active participation in international organizations, are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for compliance with civil liberties and thereby substantiates the usefulness of the explanatory framework for further research.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Michael Kaeding, Alexander Hoppe and Dimiter Toshkov for their helpful comments and valuable support throughout the period of research. Particular recognition further goes to the reviewers of this Journal. Moreover, she is grateful for the assistance of participants and organizers of panels at the 2015 ECPR Joint Sessions in Warsaw, the 2014 IRUN Conference in Nijmegen and the 2016 Compliance Conference at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Julia Schmälter is a research assistant at the Jean Monnet Chair for European Integration and European Union Politics at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Since 2014, she receives a PhD scholarship awarded by the Mercator Foundation.
Notes
1 Both indices appear promising since they put a special focus on practical implementation whereas many other databases focus on legal transposition.
2 Membership in the set of countries complying with basic civil liberties was determined by taking the minimum value across both sets. Detailed information about calibration is provided in Section 1 of the Online Appendix.
3 Data from SGI (Citation2015).
4 Data from SGI (Citation2015).
5 Note that the substitutability of these two conditions can only be assumed for negative liberties.
6 Data from Marshall et al. (Citation2014).
7 Data from Keefer and Stasavage (Citation2003).
8 Data from IPD (Citation2012).
9 Data from The World Factbook (Citation2015).
10 The analysis was conducted applying the fsQCA software.
11 Table 3 in the Online Appendix.
12 Deviant cases for consistency in kind are cases that possess qualitatively different set-membership scores in X and Y respectively and thereby contradict the postulated subset relation (Schneider and Rohlfing Citation2013).
13 To further inform the analysis of necessity, xy-plots for CAP and WILL are provided by Figures 2 and 3 in the Online Appendix.
14 Table 4 in the Online Appendix.
15 Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden are counted for both JUD and EXE since they hold the same set membership in both conditions.
16 At this stage, I would like to stress that my chosen deductive approach, as compared to inductive truth table analysis, has several implications related to limited diversity. First, the approach is not entirely faithful to the logics of INUS causation, i.e., ‘an insufficient but necessary part of a condition which is itself unnecessary but insufficient for the result’ (Schneider and Wagemann Citation2012: 79). Here, conditions might result as consistently sufficient, which through inductive truth table analysis, would have been shown to be sufficient always in combination with another condition, which we cannot identify as relevant using the deductive approach. Second, without inductive truth table analysis, there is less transparency on which cases are members of which configuration of conditions and the deductive analysis implicitly relies on counterfactual arguments. Yet, I would like to emphasize again that I established high levels of transparency throughout the analysis and all relevant data and information are provided in the Online Appendix for replication.