Eva Thomann

Researching Customization: The Data, the Methods, and the Cases

This chapter introduces the data, methods and cases that form the basis of the empirical study. The research presented here was originally a comparative research project that provided advice to the Swiss federal government about ensuring legal equivalence with community law. In order to explore the patterns, causes and consequences of customization, I employ a nested comparative case study design using innovative set-theoretic methodologies. Veterinary drug policies regulate important aspects of food safety in the EU single market. I compare their customization in four older member states—Austria, France, Germany and the United Kingdom—and the differentially integrated non-member, Switzerland. These countries are comparable in their regulatory contexts, but each of them displays distinct patterns of differentiated implementation.

Europeanized Solutions to Shared Problems? How Customization Affects Policy Outcomes

This chapter explores how customization affects the degree to which European Union (EU) food safety policies are successfully implemented. It empirically assesses the contradictory views of the relevance of discretion for effective problem-solving that prevail in the fields of policy implementation and better regulation. Focusing on the policy “in action”, I conceive of successful implementation as the absence of problems in the delivery of domestic outputs and outcomes. Results of a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of four member states and of Switzerland illustrates how customization serves as a strategy for problem-solving within an overarching framework of successful policy implementation. The evidence relativizes the EU’s “no gold-plating” policy. Depending on the regulatory context, extensive customization frequently contributes to implementation success.

Customization, Adaptive Implementation, and the “European Experience”

This chapter draws conclusions about the dynamics that drive customization and the conditions under which extensive or limited customization can contribute to successful implementation. Based on the results, I make recommendations for possible governance responses. I suggest refining frameworks of “adaptive implementation” in member state implementation by accounting for intermediate levels of ambiguity and the nature of the policy problem. These assertions await testing in other policy areas, countries, and multilevel systems. A research agenda for the study of customization in the European Union (EU) and beyond should track vertical policy change across all stages of the policy cycle and tackle the relevance of customization for better regulation, policy success, and the legitimacy of EU decision-making.

Discretion, Diversity, and Problem-Solving in the European Union

This book analyzes how and why five Western European countries “customize” EU food safety policies, as well as the implications for policy outcomes. Customization captures how countries adapt policies to local circumstances, resulting in tailor-made domestic solutions to shared problems. I argue that it is important to study the contested role of discretion, particularly if we think of the EU as the joint governance of cross-border policy problems. In order to understand this role, we need to move beyond legal compliance and account for fine-grained differences in policy implementation. In tracing the implementation of EU Directives from transposition to policy outcomes, this book contributes to the more fundamental theoretical debates surrounding the use of discretion in policy implementation.

The Best of Both Worlds? Logics of Action and Customization

Theories of Europeanization distinguish between two logics of action that states adopt when implementing European Union (EU) policies. However, how these logics interact with each other remains unknown. This chapter explores the conditions under which transposing countries customize EU Directives in rational and opportunistic manners, or whether they customize according to institutionally embedded habits and norms. I test the relative validity of four major interpretations of the relationship between the two logics by combining explanatory typologies with binomial probability tests and within-case analyses. Results reveal that member states tend to customize macro issues according to a logic of consequences, and micro issues following a logic of appropriateness. This finding has useful implications for EU governance.

Public Policy in Practice

The main purpose of the Permanent Study Group (PSG) is to develop and strengthen the ties between the fields of public administration/public management and political science/public policy by bringing scholars from these fields together. Special attention is given to implementation theory and research. Over the past years, the Study Group has contributed to gathering older and new generations of implementation researchers who contribute and publish on cutting-edge topics of policy implementation. The future agenda of PSG XIII includes making work of systematic comparative research, addressing both the limits and capacities of administration, and developing dialogues between academia and practice.

Moving Beyond (Non-)compliance: Conceptualizing Customization

The concept of “customization” captures the extent to which member states adapt centrally decided policies during transposition. This chapter introduces the concept and its measurement. I discuss how research on “gold-plating” has treated fine-grained differences in transposition beyond compliance. I argue that this perspective tends to be both normatively and empirically one-sided. Hence, I propose that this diversity be conceptualized more generally as a phenomenon of vertical regulatory change. Accordingly, we can measure these changes along the dimensions of density and stringency, without simultaneously addressing the question of compliance. Comparatively measuring customization poses challenges in terms of data availability, casing, and measurement equivalence. The concept of customization can “travel” beyond the European Union, and across both quantitative and qualitative research approaches.

Customizing Europe: Four Member States Compared

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.