Nora Dörrenbächer

Europe at the frontline: analysing street-level motivations for the use of European Union migration law

ABSTRACT This contribution investigates what motivates the use of European Union (EU) law at the street level of migration law implementation. The street level is a crucial venue for EU implementation because lower-level implementers critically influence the level of EU compliance eventually achieved. Employing a bottom–up approach towards implementation, the article combines insights from social psychology and the street-level literature to develop expectations about the relation between individuals’ motivations and their use of EU law. The study investigates through qualitative interviews to what extent German migration administrators use EU law in three multilevel decision contexts. The main findings are that uses of EU law vary across contexts and individual implementers. Particularly when national regulatory frameworks are ambiguous, substantive moral norms and instrumental motivations trigger some implementers to rely on EU law. This reliance even has the potential to correct for problematic transposition.

National Parliaments and Transposition of EU Law: A Matter of Coalition Conflict?

This article analyses to what extent the mechanism of the coalition conflict model of executive-legislative relations can account for the extent and policy direction of parliamentary control over domestic transposition, focusing on EU migration law. Our empirical approach is based on an in-depth cross-country comparison of the transposition of the Returns Directive in Austria, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. We find that in all four countries the legislatures left their marks on the final laws, and the policy direction of amendments was largely in line with the predictions of the model. Yet, the policy adjustments were not always triggered by coalition partners correcting ministerial drift, but also by factions within the ministerial party, and by opposition parties.