Customizing Europe: Four Member States Compared

Abstract

By focusing on legal compliance, EU policy implementation research has neglected more fine-grained differences in transposition. The top-down focus on compliance might not necessarily explain why member states transcend the EU’s requirements to facilitate context-sensitive problem solving. Can prominent compliance theories account for customization? Moving beyond compliance, this chapter scrutinizes the conditions under which four European Union (EU) member states customize EU food safety policies. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis and formal theory evaluation, I assess how policy and country-level factors interact. Results reveal that different customization styles simultaneously reflect the interplay between domestic politics and institutions, and the “fit” of EU regulatory modes with domestic sectoral interventionist styles. Compliance approaches cannot fully explain these fine-grained patterns of Europeanization.