3.1 Implementation Phases and Policy Areas Studied
As has already been outlined above, most of the
research has hitherto focused on the transposition of EU directives. Despite a few notable exceptions, the
tendency to neglect issues of enforcement and application has even increased in the third wave of research.
One reason for this seems to be a methodological one: As more and more scholars have turned
to quantitative approaches, enforcement and application issues have taken a back seat since
there are simply no appropriate quantitative data for analysing the “street-level” aspects of
implementation. This is rather unfortunate, since all qualitative studies that did include issues of practical
implementation have demonstrated that the “law in the books” is not necessarily the same as the
“law in action” (Versluis 2004: 13) – if that were otherwise, everything that was written in the
context of domestic implementation research would have been superfluous. Along the same lines,
it is remarkable that the implementation of EU regulations, which do not require domestic
transposition, have so far attracted so little interest (but see Siedentopf and Ziller 1988
). From the
standpoint of EU policy-making, for example, one very interesting question to be addressed
would be whether the instrument of regulations work better than directives, since they offer less
opportunities for policy drift and shirking, as the huge transposition problems identified by
many studies would imply, or whether it is even the other way round, since regulations are too
inflexible to adjust to the diverse institutional and societal conditions in a polity that comprises so
many different societies, as the Siedentopf and Ziller project suggested (Ciavarini Azzi 1988:
199).
Such a perspective could also link implementation studies to the emerging field of research on different
modes of governance (see e.g. Héritier 2002, 2003; Treib et al. 2005).
Another remarkable feature of existing EU implementation research is that studies with an explicit focus
on cross-sectoral policy comparison are in short supply. Most qualitative studies have to date
concentrated on one policy area. Particularly popular have been studies on environmental policy
(Demmke 1998; Jordan 1999a,b; Knill and Lenschow 2000b; Haverland 2000; Börzel 2003a; Bugdahn 2005),
labour law and gender equality (Hoskyns 1996; Duina 1997; Caporaso and Jupille 2001; Falkner
et al. 2005; Dimitrova and Rhinard 2005), and internal market policies (Schwarze et al. 1990, 1991, 1993; Knill
and Lehmkuhl 2000; Héritier et al. 2001). The few qualitative studies that spanned two or more policy
areas (see e.g. Siedentopf and Ziller 1988; Duina 1999) did not follow a systematic comparative approach
in the sense that they searched for systematic sectoral patterns in implementation. The same is true for the
quantitative studies. Most of these cover cross-sectoral data, but none of them has as yet sought to test
whether there are cross-sectoral differences in compliance patterns. If sectors are compared, this is usually
done in a purely descriptive manner, in order to show which policy areas are ridden with the most problems
(for example, see Börzel et al. 2004).
Therefore, EU implementation research is in need of cross-sectoral studies that could find out whether
the strong evidence for country-specific implementation styles needs to be complemented with
sector-specific (sub-)styles. Following the seminal article of Lowi (1972), domestic implementation
researchers such as Mayntz (1977), Windhoff-Héritier (1980) or Ripley and Franklin (1982) have in fact
argued that different policy types imply different conflicts and problems and therefore lead
to different types of implementation processes. Moreover, EU compliance research will need
to broaden its perspective in order to cover policies that have hitherto attracted only scant
attention, such as agricultural policy or issues belonging to the expanding area of justice and home
affairs.
