Carina Sprungk

Obstinate and Inefficient: Why Member States Do Not Comply With European Law

This article seeks to explain cross-country variation in noncompliance with European law. Although noncompliance has not significantly increased over time, some European Union member states violate European law more frequently than others.To account for the observed variance, the authors draw on three prominent approaches widely used in the compliance literature— enforcement, management, and legitimacy. They develop hypotheses for each of these approaches before combining them in theoretically consistent ways. They empirically test their hypotheses using a comprehensive data set of more than 6,300 violations of European law.The findings highlight the importance of combining the enforcement and management approaches. Powerful member states are most likely to violate European law, whereas the best compliers are small countries with efficient bureaucracies. Yet administrative capacity also matters for powerful member states. The United Kingdom is much more compliant than Italy, which commands similar political power but whose bureaucracy is far less efficient.

The Myth of a Green Europe

Unlike most nation-states, the EU faces the challenge of actively creating and sustaining myths about its polity. In this article we explore if and under what conditions the story of a ‘Green Europe’ represents a successful new myth on the European project, which is appealing to present and future generations and capable of generating legitimacy for EU politics. Exploring the narratives of policy leaders (storytellers) we trace the functional role of environmental policy for the EU polity as a whole, establish the legitimating role of environmental policy for the EU and search the extent to which the environmental narrative is constructed as an identity-building story. We argue that, while the actual performance of the EU in environmental policy might raise some doubts about the credibility and hence sustainability of the Green Europe myth, ‘green’ has become a brand attribute of the EU to the European public and carries a high level of legitimacy and potential for identification.

A New Type of Representative Democracy? Reconsidering the Role of National Parliaments in the European Union

Abstract As compensation for their disempowerment in the process of European integration, national parliaments have been provided with various new rights and powers since the 1990s, culminating in the current provisions of the Lisbon Treaty. This paper argues, however, that rather than simply re-enhancing traditional powers of national parliaments, these reforms imply ideas of a new type of parliamentary democracy in Europe. It identifies three different roles for national parliaments in the EU: preventing rather than shaping legislation (gatekeeping role), cooperating with other parliaments and supranational institutions (networking role), and adopting a uniform mode control of government across all party groups (unitary scrutiniser role). All these roles require a significant deviation from the standard role legislatures usually play in European parliamentary democracies. The paper briefly explores how national parliaments in two ‘old’ (France, Germany) and one ‘new’ (Poland) member state fulfil these three new roles.

Legislative Transposition of Directives: Exploring the Other Role of National Parliaments in the European Union

This article explores the role of national parliaments in the implementation of EU policies. It analyzes the effect of parliamentary involvement ex post on the timely transposition of EU directives by combining quantitative analyses of all Council directives adopted between 1999 and 2003 in the EU‐15 Member States, with qualitative case studies of parliamentary transposition in Germany and France. The findings show that contrary to conventional assumptions, their involvement is not necessarily a source of delayed transposition. Problems of delay might, however, arise in bicameral systems or if the government is for political reasons reluctant to submit a transposition proposal to parliament.

How Policy-Shaping Might (Not) Affect Policy-Taking: The Case Of National Parliaments in the European Union

Abstract There is an increasing literature which traces non‐compliance with European Union (EU) law back to the decision‐making stage. Yet, little attempts have been made to theorize on how and why the phase of shaping EU policies has an effect on their implementation, and to empirically demonstrate if there is a causal link between the two stages. This article seeks to fill this gap by first developing a theoretical framework which identifies three causal mechanisms linking policy‐shaping and policy‐taking: assertiveness, fairness and information. Second, it empirically tests their explanatory power by drawing on the case of national parliaments. The case studies of the Assemblée Nationale’s and the Bundestag’s involvement in the negotiation and transposition of the Water Framework Directive show that a causal link between policy‐shaping and policy‐taking is most likely if (1) actors remain identical, (2) little time elapses and (3) the involvement of implementing actors in policy‐shaping focuses on providing information.

Säkularmacht EU? Zur Europäisierung von Religion in EU-Mitgliedsstaaten

Die politikwissenschaftliche Forschung zum Verhaltnis von Religion und Politik in westlichen Demokratien war lange vom Paradigma der Sakularisierung gekennzeichnet, welches eine marginale Rolle von Religion als soziales Phanomen infolge von Modernisierungsprozessen postulierte.