Dimiter Toshkov

Embracing European Law

Accession to the European Union (EU) demands the adoption of a vast body of legislation. This paper analyses compliance with EU directives in eight post-communist countries during the Eastern enlargement and tries to account for the puzzling embrace of EU law in Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on a new data set tracking the transposition of a sample of 119 directives, the paper finds effects of both political preferences and government capacity on the likelihood of timely transposition. Furthermore, important sectoral differences are uncovered, with trade-related legislation having a better chance and environmental legislation having a significantly worse chance of being incorporated into national legal systems on time. Beyond the conditionality of the accession process, the paper unveils a complex causal structure behind the ups and downs in transposition performance.

The Dynamics of Domestic Coordination of EU Policy in the New Member States: Impossible to Lock In?

This paper examines the evolution of coordination structures for EU policy-making in the new member states from Central and Eastern Europe. The study maps the main features of the established EU coordination machineries, and traces the most important reforms of their organisational structures. It proposes an actor-centred, ‘politics of institutional choice’ approach to explain the rapid and far-reaching changes in EU coordination structures in all the new member states. By contrast, two alternative frameworks focusing on efficiency and historical-institutional arguments emphasising the impact of early institutional lock-in fail to explain the specific institutional forms adopted and the considerable degree of institutional dynamics.

Comparing transposition in the 27 member states of the EU: the impact of discretion and legal fit

Transposition performance differs significantly across countries and policy sectors in the EU. In this article we analyse the transposition efforts of all 27 member states with regard to four EC directives expected to create considerable difficulties for compliance at the national level. Using Cox proportional hazards regression, we find that discretion and legal fit are significant factors in explaining transposition. Furthermore, we discover that the new member states from Central and Eastern Europe are not doing any worse than the rest of the EU in terms of transposition timeliness. Surprisingly, government effectiveness has a negative relationship with compliance, while periods of absence of functioning government do not increase transposition time. Our findings emphasize the importance of legal-administrative factors for compliance with EU law.

In search of the worlds of compliance: culture and transposition performance in the European Union

ABSTRACT This paper tests the argument that assigning countries into three worlds of compliance helps to explain transposition performance in the European Union. Looking into what cultural features distinguish the ‘culture of compliance’ worlds shows that attitudes towards law-abidingness and rule-following, and trust in the EU institutions, are not directly related to membership in the three types. Then, focusing on the explanatory potential of the typology, the study finds that levels of non-transposition are consistent with the argument although the differences between the groups are only marginally significant. The implications of the typology for the variability of transposition performance and the differentiated impact of domestic politics in the compliance worlds are not, however, supported by the empirical analysis of yearly policy-specific data on non-transposition rates (1998–2005).

The Europeanization of asylum policy: an assessment of the EU impact on asylum applications and recognitions rates

Asylum policy in the European nation-states has been a subject of increasing influence form the European Union over the last 12 years since the call for the establishment of a Common European Asylum System. This article presents an assessment of the EU impact on the asylum policy outcomes in the 27 member states, Norway and Switzerland. The article focuses on three central hypotheses about the effects of Europeanization – a race to the bottom, convergence and burden sharing. Using aggregate and origin-specific asylum data for the period 1999–2010 provided by the UNHCR, we show that the increasing Europeanization of asylum policy has not resulted in a race to the bottom in which asylum recognition rates and the numbers of admitted refugees have eroded. Contrary to existing literature, we find some evidence for convergence of the overall asylum recognition rates but important national differences in the recognition of applicants from the same country of origin persist. Europeanization has not led to more equal distribution of the applications and recognitions of asylum status in Europe. Overall, the EU has had only a limited impact on the changes in asylum policy outcomes.

Public opinion and policy output in the European Union: A lost relationship

The European Union (EU) is assumed to suffer from a democratic deficit. It is often posited that in the EU there is only a weak and indirect connection between public preferences and policy change. This article investigates empirically whether any relationship exists between public support for European integration and EU policy output (1973—2008). Using a new indicator of policy output — the volume of important legislation produced in a semester — I discover a surprising relationship between public support and legislative production. Employing vector autoregression (VAR), I demonstrate that public EU support Granger-causes legislative output but not vice versa, and that the relationship is strong up to the middle of the 1990s but non-existent afterwards. The effect is robust to the inclusion of indicators of the state of the economy and government preferences. In addition, I discover that the average level of EU support in the Council of Ministers follows unemployment levels with a four-year delay.

Transposition of EU social policy in the new member states

This article analyses transposition of European Union (EU) social policy legislation in the new member states (NMS) from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). In order to account for the varying rate of adoption of EU law at the national level the article develops several hypotheses about the impact of government preferences and administrative capacity on the pace of transposition in the social policy field. The hypotheses are tested on a new dataset comprising data on the transposition of EU social policy directives in the new member states. The results of the quantitative empirical analysis show that government support for European integration and administrative effectiveness has positive and substantial effects on the number of directives transposed in a given period of time. However, government positions on the Left—Right and libertarianism—traditionalism dimensions do not affect the adoption of EU social policy legislation in CEE.

The Inter-institutional Division of Power and Time Allocation in the European Parliament

This paper examines whether the European Parliament strategically adapts to the inter-institutional balance of power by allocating its resources so that it spends more time in those areas of competence where it has the greatest power. Focusing on the legislative area, the authors examine whether differences in the inter-institutional division of power between different legislative procedures affect how long the EP spends on reaching its first reading position. They conduct a large-N analysis of over 3,000 legislative acts and a complementary analysis of treaty articles where the required decision procedure changed. In all analyses, the inter-institutional balance of power has the expected effect. The authors show that the EP spends more time reaching its first reading opinion in co-decision than it does in the consultation procedure where it has less power, even when they control for the characteristics of the files debated and the level of disagreement on the files.

Does Immigration Undermine Public Support for Integration in the European Union

It is well established that negative attitudes towards immigrants are strongly associated with lower public support for European integration. But the impact of actual immigration levels on immigration attitudes is still contested. As a result, the relationship between immigration levels and EU public support remains uncertain from a theoretical point of view. We offer an empirical study of the link between immigration from the new EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and EU support at the regional level in Spain, France, Ireland and The Netherlands. The results of the analyses suggest that in all four countries immigration from CEE had negative effects on support for European integration in the host societies. In short, immigration seems to undermine integration, although internal migration within the EU is necessary for the successful functioning of its economic union and the future of political integration.

The effect of stakeholder involvement on legislative duration: Consultation of external actors and legislative duration in the European Union

Despite the increased use of stakeholder consultations, little is known about their impact on the legislative process. We examine how consultation of external actors during policy preparation affects decision-making duration and efficiency. We test our predictions on EU legislative decision-making and we find that although stakeholder consultations in policy preparation may increase the democratic legitimacy of decision-making, they result in efficiency losses in the subsequent legislative processes. Hence, rather than smoothing the way for quick legislative reconciliation, consultations increase the transaction costs of subsequent bargaining by prolonging the time needed to form the necessary coalitions and reach legislative deals. However, despite the proliferation of different tools for involving external actors, we find no differences in legislative speed between open and restricted consultations.