Post-Accession Compliance between Administrative Co-Ordination and Political Bargaining

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between administrative co-ordination of EU affairs at the national level and compliance with EU law. First, we develop two hypotheses about the impact of co-ordination. We expect that the strength of the co-ordination structure (level of centralisation and political support) will improve levels of transposition of EU law. Administrative co-ordination becomes irrelevant, however, for the transposition of EU laws that attain political salience and trigger political opposition. We test these conjectures by an aggregate country-level analysis of transposition rates and a qualitative comparative analysis of eight cases covering two directives. Both analyses support our expectations that strong administrative co-ordination of EU affairs leads to smaller transposition deficits in the aggregate. However, for highly salient directives that touch upon constitutional issues and trigger opposition from political actors outside the executive, administrative co-ordination cannot help.

Keywords: policy co-ordination, implementation, comparative public policy, administrative adaptation, Central and Eastern Europe, political science