Policy matters but why? Explaining non-compliance with European law across sectors
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
There is a growing body of research on noncompliance with EU law. Most studies seek to find out why some member states violate EU laws more frequently than others. The literature has paid far less attention to the question of why member state noncompliance is concentrated in particular policy sectors. Part of the reason is a lack data to map sector-specific noncompliance and of adequate theories to explain possible variation. The project set out to fill the empirical and theoretical gap. It compiled a database with more than 13,300 violations of EU law the EU officially recorded between 1978 and 2019 (March). As the most comprehensive database on noncompliance with EU law to date, the Berlin Infringement Database (BDI) allows for analyzing variation in noncompliance not only across policy sectors, but also across member states, time, type of legal act, and type of violation. The data of the BID reveal that noncompliance in the EU is concentrated in only four policy sectors: Environment, Justice & Home Affairs, Information Society & Media, and Health & Consumer Protection. Following Theodore Lowi’s famous dictum that policy determines politics, the project develops one of the first attempts to theorize sector-related noncompliance in the EU. It argues that regulatory policy produces higher compliance costs than non-regulatory policy. (Re-)distributive policy is also costly but the costs arise in decision-making, not in implementation. Regulatory policy is particularly costly if it is market-correcting rather than market making. Harmonizing national standards to protect EU citizens against failures of the Internal Market requires institutional and behavioral change in the member states, which are costly and more likely to give rise to political conflict. The findings of the project have informed the building of a general theory of noncompliance, which not only explains why noncompliance with EU law varies across policy sectors. It also provides answers for why some member states violate EU law more frequently than others and why noncompliance has been declining over the past 20 years, despite a growing body of EU law and an increasing number of member states that have to comply with it. By focusing on the increasing relevance of political conflict over the EU and its laws, the theoretical arguments and empirical findings of the project have important implications of for the effectiveness and legitimacy of the EU, and international governance more broadly. The increasing politicization of international trade, security, or climate change policy shows the limits of international regulation in dealing with redistributive issues. International institutions lack sufficient tax and spending capacity to engage in meaningful redistribution. At the same time, they increasingly constrain states in making social adjustments to compensate those of their citizens that do not profit from globalization. The rise of nationalist movements and populist parties in Europe and the US challenging the liberal foundations of Western societies and the international order alike, may be the harbingers of post-regulatory politics. States need to tackle redistribution directly and decide who gets what in a transparent and accountable way instead of leaving this decision to independent agencies or the global markets.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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2012. Quantifying Non-Compliance in the EU. A Database on Infringement Proceedings. In Berliner Arbeitspapiere zu Europäischen Integration 15, Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin
Börzel, Tanja A. and Moritz Knoll
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2016. A Two-level Model of Compliance. Non-compliance with EU Directives across Policy Sectors, Dissertationsschrift. Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin
Knoll, Moritz
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2016. From EU Governance of Crisis to Crisis in EU Governance. Regulatory Failure, Redistributive Conflict, and Eurosceptic Publics, Journal of Common Market Studies. The JCMS Annual Review of the European Union in 2015 54 (S1), 8-23
Börzel, Tanja A.
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2017. Enforcement and Compliance. In Carol. Harlow, Leino Päivi and Giacinto della Cananea (eds), Research Handbook on EU Administrative Law, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 241-262
Börzel, Tanja A. and Eva Heidbreder
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2017. Larger and More Law-abiding? The Impact of Enlargement on Compliance in the European Union, Journal of European Public Policy 24 (2), 197-217
Börzel, Tanja A. and Ulrich Sedelmeier
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2019. Compliance with EU Environmental Law. The Iceberg is Melting, Environmental Politics 28(2): 315-341
Börzel, Tanja A. and Aron Buzogany
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Why noncompliance: the politics of law in the European Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. 282 S.
Börzel, Tanja A.
