Tobias Hofmann

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.

Caving in or sitting it out? Longitudinal patterns of non-compliance in the European Union

Member states of the European Union (EU) respond differently when they get caught for violations of European law and face prosecution. While Portugal tends to settle its non-compliance cases quickly and at an early stage of the EUs official infringement proceedings, Italy and Belgium like to sit them out and do not even comply with rulings of the European Court of Justice after being convicted twice – first for violating EU law and then for not acting upon the courts original judgment. This paper explores the explanatory power of prominent compliance theories to address these diverging patterns of persistent non-compliance across EU member states and tests a set of hypotheses that accounts for the non-compliance dynamics across the different stages of the EUs infringement proceedings and over time. We find that both differences in capacity and power explain the variation in longitudinal non-compliance patterns.