4 Conclusion

The process of implementing policies enacted at the EU level is a particularly interesting object of study. The EU is marked by a highly decentralised implementation structure that leaves responsibility for policy execution to the member states. Given the heterogeneity of interests among the actors involved in EU decision-making and the high consensus requirements, EU policies often contain fuzzy concepts and leave certain issues to the discretion of member states in order to facilitate agreement. What applies to implementation in general is thus particularly true for the domestic execution of EU policies: crucial decisions that may decide on the success or failure of a policy are regularly taken at the implementation stage.

It was not until the mid 1980s that EU scholars discovered this interesting issue. Since then, the field has developed into one of the growth industries within EU research. In light of the considerable proliferation of EU compliance studies, especially over the last couple of years, this essay has sought to provide a systematic overview of the historical development of the field, and it has endeavoured to identify the most important theoretical, empirical and methodological lessons to be drawn so far.

Despite some notable exceptions, research has until now focused to a remarkable degree on transposition, while comparatively little is known about issues of enforcement and application. Also, few studies have systematically explored processes of implementation in different policy areas, and certain important sectors have been neglected. There is thus a huge empirical field to be explored by future research.¹¹

With regard to transposition, scholars meanwhile seem to agree that we need to address factors that influence both the capacity of member states to comply and the willingness of domestic actors to fulfil the requirements stemming from EU legislation. The most important capacity variables appear to be administrative efficiency and veto players. With regard to willingness, the most significant factors seem to be political preferences of governments and interest groups as well as cultural dispositions. The main task to be accomplished by future research is to establish under which conditions which configurations of factors prevail. As a first step, there is strong evidence suggesting that the general transposition styles differ significantly between different country clusters. More research is needed to establish how far transposition patterns also vary between different sectors within member states.

Despite the relatively few research efforts explicitly devoted to enforcement and application, one insight gained so far is that research on the logics underlying the phase of practical implementation requires different theoretical approaches than those applied to transposition. Making more use of the theoretical insights gained from domestic implementation research would seem to be a particularly promising avenue for future research in this area.

In methodological terms, finally, the above survey of the literature has uncovered a number of problems associated with the steadily growing number of quantitative analyses. Unless these problems, which are mainly associated with the quality of the available data used to measure the dependent variable, have been solved, scholars are well advised to rely on comparative case studies, at least in addition to statistical analyses. Some of the earlier research has demonstrated that well-organised case study research does not have to be confined to small-n studies. Crafting collaborative research projects in which something between 50 and 100 cases would be analysed qualitatively by a group of scholars would thus seem to be a viable alternative to quantitative research. This is especially true for the study of enforcement and application, where no quantitative data are available.