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ABSTRACT
Do interest groups have an impact on transposition of European Union (EU) directives? This paper offers an analysis of interest group communities of member states and links the concept of diversity to legal implementation. In order to accommodate diverse interests, member state governments allow for some deviations when transposing EU legislation into national law. Therefore, successful transposition is hard to achieve in member states with diverse interest group environments. This paper tests this argument by applying a large N study including 19 directives and 15 member states. The results show that correct transposition is likely to be negatively affected by high levels of diversity of national interest groups; however, this effect is conditional on the discretion granted to member states by EU legislation.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Frank Schimmelfennig, Asya Zhelyazkova, Reini Schrama, all my colleagues at ETH Zurich and participants at the panel ‘Multilevel Administration’ at the 2015 EGPA Annual Conference (Toulouse, August 2015) for their valuable comments, as well as two anonymous reviewers and the JEPP editors.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Cansarp Kaya is a PhD candidate at European Politics Research Group at ETH Zurich. Address for correspondence: Cansarp Kaya, ETH Zurich, European Politics, IFW D 37, Haldeneggsteig 4, Zurich 8092, Switzerland.
Notes
2 See Appendix A (online) for the list of directives.
3 Quittikat (Citation2011) argues that new member states are still unfamiliar with EU consultations; therefore, any data based on EU consultations is misleading for these countries. Therefore, member states that joined the EU in 2004 and later are excluded from this analysis.
4 The consultations related to general policy issues are not included in this study because they are targeted to a wider range of stakeholders I made sure that the directive name is either mentioned in the title or in the consultation document.
5 Regional, European, international and non-EU interest groups are excluded from the dataset because national governments’ transposition decisions are very unlikely to be influenced by those stakeholders.
6 See Appendix B for the list of categories.
7 For three directives, on which the Commission initiated consultations both before and after transposition, the duration variable is zero.
8 See Appendix C and D for the descriptive results.
9 This observation is partly biased because the consultation reports with regard to 2001/81/EC and 2006/118/EC were only explicit about minimum diversity cases and most cases of diversity had to be coded as missing. The results remain the same when these two directives are excluded from the models.
10 Notwithstanding that, the observations are also nested in member states. In other words, transposition of a directive in one member state can be influenced by transposition of other directives in the same member state. Therefore, as robustness checks, additional models adjusted for member states clusters were run and the results, which mostly stayed the same, presented in Appendix E.
11 See Appendix E.